Years ago, I wrote about starting Sequences, a project I posted to a few times, but which never went anywhere, and fell off the map.
Far and away the main reason the project failed is lack of tenacity on my part – it’s so easy not to find the time, especially during travel, but there were a couple other reasons:
Each sequence was its own brand new project, and even though starting a new one just involved copying a TOML file, selecting cover art, and writing an intro, it was enough activation energy to give me an excuse not to do it.
Each sequence having a rigid theme acted as a constraint, making it that much harder to come up with new content.
Over the last couple weeks I’ve rewritten the generator code to simplify and reboot the system. The separate, themed sequences get flattened down to one, so there’s no need to kick off anything new, and now just one, easy place to add updates that can be about anything.
And even though photography is cool, I like the idea of making each entry its own miniature blog post that’s more than a trivial caption. On a trip recently I took a stab at writing daily updates for a newsletter of sorts, but by day two had realized it was way too much to commit to along with everything else (and a barely usable internet connection). A short update to go along with a photo or three is a lot more tractable.
In the old philosophy of cool URIs don’t change, old permalinks now redirect to new homes in the shared sequence. The Atom feed is the same URL that it was before.
And although still very much a work-in-progress, I’m playing with the idea of plugging it into a toy Spring ‘83 server implementation, which I love the idea of. Microblogging initiatives of this sort tend to be dead ends with perfect reliability, but no one who’s interested in them is doing it for the money.
Did I make a mistake? Please consider sending a pull request.