Colophon
My aim with zachbarocas.com in its current iteration is to keep it as simple as possible. Previous iterations on other platforms proved to be durable in some cases but all in all not satisfying: I spent more time futzing with them than writing or posting anything, or their features sets weren’t quite right, or I was just being impulsive in thinking I should switch. I’m very happy with my current setup, and if you’re reading this, I imagine you’re enjoying this version of things, too.
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The site has a light or dark mode determined by your system settings. I learned to set this up from a post by Sara Joy, whose description of such development was exactly to my level of understanding, simple, and direct. I’ll probably tune it all up at some point but for now it works as promised and that seems pretty cool in itself.
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I draft and write the site in iA Writer. Whatever other apps catch my eye, I always come back to Writer. Notes, such as they might be, are kept in Bear.
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I use blot.im to manage this site. Blot is the simplest platform I’ve come across. It works by syncing a set of folders in Dropbox or Google Drive. In my case, it’s one folder for drafts, one for posts, one for pages, and one for images. That’s it. I can’t recommend it enough if your current situation feels too complicated or takes too much work to update and maintain.
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I’ve been a micro.blog subscriber on and off since the beginning. I’ve used it for just about everything it can do over the years and currently use it to cross-post from zachbarocas.com to Bluesky. It’s otherwise a fine Hugo-based blogging platform but I didn’t like using Hugo. What I do like about micro.blog is its philosophy and its effort to maintain a user-positive platform.
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I edit all of my photos in Adobe Lightroom or Lightroom Classic. I’ve tried to escape the Adobe environment and met with some success, but it turns out I’m not quite ready to reassess and rebuild my photo library as some other applications require. I optimize the site’s photos with ImageOptim.
