Chris Hannah

One problem that tends to crop up every now and then for me is how I separate my online writing.

Right now I have a main blog, a micro blog, and a dev blog.

My micro blog is more for life updates and more meta commentary, the dev blog has been used for updates on my personal projects. But the main blog has always been where the confusion comes from.

Sometimes, I want it to be a source of well thought-out posts, where I’ve elaborated on an idea, or researched a topic. Other times, I want it to be a central place for links to other articles, short comments, quickly written posts, alongside my other longer posts.

The ideal separation I have in mind right now is this:

• Blog - Medium to long form writing. With me putting a good amount of thought into each post.
• Micro blog - Short form writing, links to interesting things, and also maybe longer personal updates.
• Dev blog - Updates on personal development projects.
• Twitter - Anything that really doesn’t fit on a blog.

I think for this to happen, I’d need to do three things:

• Move all micro posts from my blog to my micro blog.
• Delete all nonsensical posts from my blog.
• Potentially move some long form writing from my micro blog to my blog.

I guess the tricky bit will be actually doing all of this. Maybe the best way is to export my entire blog, organise it locally, and import?

I’ve been streaming on Twitch a bit today, while I’ve been playing a new character on World of Warcraft.

In no way shape or form do I intend to become a big gaming streamer, but I do find it an interesting challenge to see what could happen if I streamed relatively often.

This idea mainly came from the achievements section on the Twitch creator dashboard:

I found this by accident, and when I saw it, I just thought how incredible this is for new streamers. I know first hand from blogging, that sometimes you can be wondering where to start, what to focus on, and also being able to see your progress. But with this resource, you can track your goals and you get an idea of what you should be aiming for next.

Where it won’t really work for myself, is that when I stream, I stream a game (usually World of Warcraft), I don’t have any camera, I don’t talk through the mic, and I don’t adapt my gameplay for the stream.

However, seeing as I have fun playing World of Warcraft (right now I’m actually playing a new character), I guess I may as well stream it, and see where it goes.

I don’t see myself ever being someone who has a regular schedule, or to ever play a game to simply stream. But I do think I will start streaming, and probably chatting, when I play World of Warcraft from now on. Especially when I know I’ll be playing for a decent amount of time.

So if that sounds interesting, then feel free to come over to my Twitch channel. And if you want to chat, just say Hi in the Twitch chat!

For reference, here is a stream from earlier today when I was starting a new character:

Using my minimal Micro.blog theme as a base, I’ve now created another theme. This time it’s a bit louder, probably a tad more niche, but definitely has character.

It’s called Fortis, which is Latin for “strong”. As this is definitely a strong theme, that may not suit most people’s tastes.

In many ways it’s similar to the Pure theme, with the layout being practically the same. But as was the purpose of that theme, it served as a good base for more custom designs.

As usual, the theme is available on GitHub, it runs on Hugo 0.91, and I’m actually currently running it on my micro blog right now.

Here are a few screenshots of the theme:

Post

Micro Post

Archive

I find it funny when I see YouTube videos with people showing off their “minimalist” EDCs. It’s usually a mix of wireless headphones, some complex wallet, key accessories, multi-tool, weirdly a knife is normally included, pen, notebook, water bottle, usb stick, handheld games console, etc. Most of them time, everything being in matte black.

It’s something that I think really shows off how much of a bubble most tech people live in.

When I leave my house, whether I’m going to the shops, out to London, to a restaurant, etc. I carry three things: phone, wallet, and keys. My wallet has three things in it, a bank card, drivers license, and potentially a few notes. And I only have 2 keys, so that’s also pretty minimal.

I’m not trying to argue with what people need with them, I just find that type of video as a general source of humour for me.

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts online today, and one thing that struck me on quite a few of them was the readability of the page.

I found myself enjoying blogs that had rather minimal amounts of “stuff” on the page above the article contents. Instead of a big logo and a long list of navigation links, most of them had a small (but identifiable) blog title, a few links, but then straight to the post.

While I’ve been a fan of minimal layouts for a while, I always had the idea that I needed to have as many links as possible in my navigation menu. And my name had to be huge to make sure that everyone knew who the person behind the blog was.

But since doing a lof reading of others blogs, I realised that I was designing it for myself, rather than for any potential readers.

So based on this, I’ve made a few small adjustments:

• I’ve swapped the big animating title into a small title in the top left.
• The (single) advert has moved to the bottom of the post.
• The navigation menu has shrunk and is inline with the title.
• The meta information on a post is more clear, and I will look to add reading time to this soon.
• Post titles are larger when viewing specific posts.
• The dark blue colours used for dark mode have been replaced with a more neutral tone.

You can view the new design on my blog at chrishannah.me. But here are a few screenshots:

No doubt I’ll be making a few more tweaks in the next few days, but I do hope that the new design is more usable for readers.