Tinderbox meetup, Feb. 24, 2024
What a good day. At noon, I and about 27 other nerds joined a weekly Zoom meetup about Tinderbox. This one featured Dave Rogers and Jack Baty demonstrating how to blog with Tinderbox. I realize that makes it sound like there’s one way to do it. There are endless ways to “blog with Tinderbox”. It just depends on what you want to accomplish, how deep you want to get, and what your tolerance is for figuring it out as you go.
After reading Jack’s and Dave’s blogs for years, this was the closest I’d come to “meeting” them and it was a treat! Those guys are open books and I think they blog because they can’t not blog. Their enthusiasm is infectious and it got me all excited about the idea of using Tinderbox for something, and about the idea of blogging in general. I even had a brief thought as I looked at Jack’s neatly-named nodes for each post (formatted automatically with dates, but not technically named as they’re shown) that I could use Tinderbox as a CMS for Blot. The question is, should I? Truly, with Blot, I don’t need anything more than Dropbox and whatever text editor I’m in the mood for that day.
Things that made me perk up in addition to the blogging demos:
- Mark Anderson showed off some Tinderbox keyboard shortcuts I’d never seen. I could probably do 95% of what I think I need to do in Tinderbox outlines. These shortcuts would make that easier.
- Dave organizes his NetNewsWire RSS feeds into folders of: bloggers, news, locals, social media, Tools for Thought, YouTube, photography, etc. I’ve always just lumped together all the feeds I follow. Maybe I could try this approach and it wouldn’t feel like such an undifferentiated blob of stuff every day.
- Maybe try Forklift for FTP? Or I could just stick with Transmit, which I already have.
- Mark Anderson says not to forget the Export tab above each note if you want to see the generated HTML.
- Static.app looks fun for static hosting.
I may have to start joining these meetups more often. It gives me a charge to see people having this much fun learning stuff as they solve their own problems. And I probably need a regular dose of encouragement to use software that’s only available on a laptop. Limiting your apps to only things you can also use on an iPhone or iPad is likely to keep your work shallow.
It was raining after the meetup, so I started and finished re-installing underlayment and the kitchen floor slats we had to pull up in January (when Lowe’s was supposed to install a new dishwasher and didn’t, giving the water supply line we had unhooked ample time to leak all over half the floor). I appreciate the floor all over again now.