All I wanted was a travelogue →

Published 6 Hours Ago  ·  All posts on Jul 1

I’m aware there’s an XKCD about standards. (There are 14 different variations? I’ll make one which includes all of that and it’ll be better. There are 15 different variations.)

But all I wanted was an invite-only website where I could post some photos (and the occasional short video) and invite my family and friends to follow along. I did not want an iPhone app that GPS tracks my location. I just wanted, effectively, a tiny little blog for travel. It’s opinionated about restraint: no ads, no tracking, no growth-hacking, no dark patterns — software that’s calm and on my side. This is the beautiful open Web at its best…

Private by default, not as an afterthought — Invite-only from the ground up — no public index, no search-engine footprint, no “oops, that was public the whole time.” Multiple independent spaces (“travelogues”) under one account — separate trips, separate audiences, separate guest lists. Self-hosted and dependency-light — my photos live on my server, not in someone else’s data business.

Sign in the way you actually want to — Passwordless email links, passwords, Google, or passkeys / Touch ID — pick any, mix freely, change your mind later. Every method stacks on one identity; no account fragmentation. A real account-settings page: change your email (with re-verification), see your active sessions, sign out everywhere, or delete yourself cleanly.

Posting that gets out of your way — Drag-and-drop photos, many at once, uploading live while you write. Automatic web-resizing, thumbnails, EXIF-orientation fixes, and in-browser HEIC conversion — no “please export as JPEG” friction. iPhone videos transcode themselves in the background to a format that plays everywhere, poster frame included. Per-photo captions and drag-to-reorder; Markdown when you want it, plain text when you don’t.

A reading experience designed for the follower, not the feed — A calm one-post-at-a-time reader and a full timeline — no infinite scroll, no engagement tricks. Per-reader “what’s new since you last looked,” with a summary of what actually changed. Threaded replies. Opt-in “there are updates” email digests with genuine one-click unsubscribe — notifications that respect the recipient.

Sharing that feels like handing someone a photo — Turn any single photo into a private, self-expiring share link — no account required on the other end. Collect a batch and send them in one email, in your own words, from your own address. Time-boxed by design (links lapse on their own) so sharing doesn’t quietly become forever.

Quietly capable underneath — Owner controls: approve/decline followers per space, one-off invite links, a site-wide announcement banner. An admin dashboard plus a private activity feed (RSS) across every space. Background job processing, schema that migrates itself on deploy, and a test suite behind it — boring in the ways infrastructure should be.

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What’s a daily blog actually for? →

Published 1 Day Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 30  ·  ,

I started this blog in August 2011 as a place to post a eulogy. Fifteen years and over 5,000 posts later, it’s no longer one thing. It’s a system that does several jobs at once — exposes me to material I wouldn’t otherwise read, forces a third pass on anything that catches my attention, makes me decide what’s actually worth keeping, and gives me an archive to come back to when I’ve forgotten what I once knew.

This thread is about why I keep doing it. Not as advice — I have no idea whether what works for me would work for you — but as the working-out of a practice that has shaped how I think for over a decade. The blog isn’t precious. It’s messy. I work with the garage door up. The thread is sequenced for someone wondering whether it’s still worth doing this kind of thing.

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What does it take to stop on purpose? →

Published 8 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 23  ·  

Movement culture, creator culture, work culture — most of what we celebrate is not stopping. Persist. Endure. Show up. Don’t quit. The people we admire are usually the ones who kept going.

This thread is about the other half. Knowing when to stop. Stopping on purpose. Refusing what you could endure but shouldn’t. Walking away from something good because it’s done.

Mostly my own writing on the practice of finishing — what’s changed about my work-ethic dial, how I think about endings now versus a decade ago, what happens when you stop while you still want more. Two field notes from the movement and podcasting worlds where the same lesson surfaces from different angles. And a closing piece on the only ending we don’t get to choose, and what it tells us about all the others.

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What Actually Changes →

Published 14 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 17  ·  

After you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll notice some things have shifted.

You stop having the same conversation with yourself repeatedly. Once you’ve worked through something and written down the conclusion, you can reference it instead of re-arguing it.

You catch yourself starting to spiral and think “I should write this down.” The notebook becomes the obvious tool for dealing with overwhelm instead of just another thing you’re supposed to do.

You start trusting your past self. When you write “figured out X, see page Y for reasoning,” you actually go look at page Y instead of assuming you need to re-figure it out.

You have answers to “what have you been working on?” Because you can look it up instead of trying to reconstruct it from vague memory.

These aren’t dramatic transformations. But they add up to something significant: you waste less mental energy on things the notebook can handle for you.

That’s the whole point.

You’ve got everything you need. A notebook, a method that works, and practices you can use when they’re helpful. The rest is just using it.

Write things down. Think more clearly. Do less work overall.

It’s that simple.

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This is the final post in a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for people who feel overwhelmed to start simply writing more on paper. Get the book →

What does presence actually take? →

Published 15 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 16  ·  

The tagline at the top of this site is Presence, not pursuit. This thread is the working-out of what those words actually mean — for me, after years of chasing the next thing and finding myself less present, not more.

Presence isn’t a state you arrive at by trying harder; trying harder is the problem. Some of the pieces below are mine — what’s changed about my own attention as I’ve gotten older, what stillness looks like when I let it land, what acceptance has done to my happiness arithmetic. Others are field notes from movement conversations where the same lesson surfaces from radically different angles: standing practice that strips away every distraction, a Camino pilgrim told the meeting with herself comes first, a man recovering from a stroke whose anchor is just “this is what’s happening.”

The thread is sequenced for someone who’s tired of seeking and ready to notice.

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Find your people

Find your people →

Published 20 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 11

I hope this inspires you to LISTEN to YOUR body: 54, post surgery, post radiation, in ADT (abs zero testosterone, whole body muscle aches, flabby…), getting hot in Pa today… and my brain is screaming MOVE!! Walk, yoga, QM. Hat tips to Adam McClellan for inviting me to my first class, Travis Tetting for giving me this shirt, Stany Foucher for sooo much training… It’s dangerous to go alone. Find your people. I’m lucky.

Also, FUCK CANCER.

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What can hand writing actually do? →

Published 22 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 9  ·  

I’ve been keeping a personal journal and tinkering with notebooks, lists, prompts, and reminders for decades. The longer I’ve done it, the more convinced I am that hand-writing isn’t a quaint preference — it’s a different way of thinking. The pen slows you down. The page absorbs what your head keeps re-running. You stop having to remember things you’ve already worked through. It’s not magic. It’s just paper. But over years I believe it has changed what my mind does in any given hour.

This thread runs through how the practice actually works for me — what hand-writing changes about attention, what the daily routines look like, why the lists matter, what reflection adds, and what shows up years later when you rummage through an old notebook. The book Hand-Write. Think Better. is the one-place compression of all of that and this thread is the longer conversation behind it.

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What About Digital Tools? →

Published 28 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 3  ·  

People ask about digital note-taking tools. Notion, Obsidian, Roam, whatever the current favorite is.

Those tools are fine. They solve different problems.

The notebook works because:

  • Writing by hand is slower, which forces clearer thinking
  • It’s always available (no boot time, no battery, no “let me find the right app”)
  • There’s no temptation to organize before you write
  • You can’t accidentally delete it
  • It works the same way in 20 years

Digital tools work because:

  • They’re searchable
  • They’re backed up
  • You can reorganize
  • You can share
  • They integrate with other systems

Different trade-offs.

For thinking through problems and capturing thoughts in the moment, I’ll take paper. For building reference systems or collaborative work, digital makes sense.

You can use both. They’re not competing. They’re solving different problems.

The question isn’t “paper or digital?” It’s “what are you trying to do right now?”

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This is part of a series about Hand-Write. Think Better.—a method for using paper to think more clearly. Get the book →

Fasting — what I’ve actually learned →

Published 29 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 2  ·  , ,

I started in 2008-ish by cutting refined carbs. Intermittent fasting — 16:8 — came later. I’m still over-weight. I’m not selling anything. The pieces below are the ones I keep pointing to when someone asks me what I think.

This thread is sequenced for someone wondering whether to be more intentional about when they eat. None of it answers that question for you. It just tells you what an honest version of the n=1 looks like over a long timeline, and suggests things you might want to try.

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A state of mind →

Published 29 Days Ago  ·  All posts on Jun 2  ·  

Is wild determined by your distance from the nearest city? Does it mean there is no plane passing overhead, no boat offshore, no light on the horizon? As I explored the far reaches and, later, those closer to home, I learned that wild is not a place, it is a state of mind.

~ Ian Shive

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