Practicing good Mike At Eleven publishing habits

by Mike Levin

Friday, August 20, 2021

Hello World! It’s Mike At Eleven! I just launched that website yesterday with the intent of doing some live streaming (or at least content releases) on my channels (usually YouTube but others soon) at 11:00 AM and PM. And here I am 11 AM the next day… woot! We’ll see if it sticks.

I’ll often do silent journal streaming like this, for I’m sure an audience of almost no one. But I always have things on my mind and am fine with thinking out loud to myself, and in this case some potential audience because YouTube lets me, so hey, why not? It could be the thing that sticks.

Whether or not it sticks, it certainly can be the catalyst for other things. The first rule of making stuff happen is to capture your ideas and begin the process of actualizing. An idea is more real merely by virtue of writing it down. In the information age such as we’re in, it actually is real in the sense that it’s published and shared content that’s consumed by other people, plaid back in their heads, and that makes it real in at least the sense that stories are real. It’s no longer locked away.

Okay enough of that. Let’s get down to some actual actualization. 1, 2, 3… 1? Well, it’s really the work day and I’m just taking a short break for this. And so I think through what goes next naturally on this site. I work dramatically differently from most people, and that makes a lot of difference in how useful I am professionally and even how I think in my personal life.

For example, vim. Can you imagine just thinking out loud to yourself like this in VSCode? Where would you begin? Where I begin is in a github repo. It’s actually a git repo that happens to be stored in a private repository on Github. Many folks treat git and Github like the same thing. They’re not. Github is a community site built up around the git program written by Linus Torvalds to help with Linux kernel development. Github is a site that sprung up around the git program because even though git is already a DISTRIBUTED revision control system, one of the places that’s nice to distribute your code is to a “centralized” location that you can always push to and pull from for backup, undo and switching machine locations. Forget about developer collaboration for a moment.

Let me demonstrate…

There! Now all my latest journal changes are in Github. Now I don’t actually publish my daily journal even though I back it up to Github. It’s in a private repo and I only publish excerpts. One place I publish them is to:

MikeAtEleven.com

HERE! Or soon to be here. How do I do this? I add another vim buffer. Observe:

It’s in my 2nd vim buffer now which I can cycle to with:

:n

Observe…

That was my entry from yesterday. But I want today’s entry over there too. And so today’s “At Eleven” video will be about making a 2nd entry. Soon I will type these things over in that journal (in defiance of my own 1-textfile-for-life principle) for the sake of the site.

And I will show you how my vim blogging macro works. But first…

That’s “before”. In a moment you will see this entry go live over there…

Not yet. I will take the bottom of yesterday’s entry from my main journal while we wait and make the below entry technically complete…

Okay, so today’s entry is pushed (so far) and yesterday’s complete entry will be out in a moment. To avoid that in the future, I will always start my Mike At Eleven ramblings in this journal/repo. Remember, it’s a folder on my drive…

And to make vim work a little more like blogging software, I have a macro that does this:

The macro uses that “Bxginning of Journal” text to do the insert at the top of this “stream”. Changed the spelling here so as to not interfere with the macro. And so tomorrow I do this…

Or later tonight at 11. You get the idea. Well anyway, that was Mike At Eleven. Thanks for joining me and don’t forget to subscribe.