Everybody else went to bed some time ago. I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of the desk lamps while Billy Joel plays the piano and sings.
I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this evening - cleaning and tidying the thousands of blog posts hidden away in the backup I curate and maintain. Away from the public gaze I have everything I’ve ever written stored in “markdown” format - plain text files. It’s an insurance policy of sorts - to make sure I don’t lose my writing in the event of disaster.
Over time I’ve become lazy - copying and pasting into the archive from various platforms and text editors - some of which are far too clever for their own good - decorating text with curly quotes, em-dashes, non breaking spaces, and so on. In the grand scheme of things, spotting the odd ligature in your text isn’t the end of the world, but once you know they are there, they eat away at you - or rather, they eat away at me.
It’s a slippery slope. What started out as few minutes tidying up some obvious issues turned into an entire evening. An entire evening I might have spent far more productively.
It didn’t help that I then spent an hour creating a second incarnation of the blog using a static site generator called “Jekyll” - mainly because I could. I do that sort of thing a lot.
We won’t mention that it occurred to me that I might move the motherlode of text files into Obsidian - a rather wonderful cross-platform note-taking tool that also uses markdown.
I really am my own worst enemy sometimes.
While writing largely about nothing at all, the clock has ticked past midnight once again. Billy Joel went home some time ago. Tori Amos has dragged her piano out to centre stage, is sitting sideways on the seat, and has begun singing “Winter”.
I’ll always have a soft-spot for Tori.
It’s late. I should go brush my teeth, then fall into bed.