Hello (3)

hello world

This is actually a new iteration of a number of old posts, which I have merged and updated.

Basically I started trying out listed.to a second time, following the March 2022 roadmap update from Standard Notes. Soon, it said, users of Standard Notes would be able to publish from mobile devices, making this a far more relevant blogging platform for me. So right now I'm getting some fresh dirt under the nails. And they delivered 😊.

I've been an user of Standard Notes for about 3 years as of this writing (August 2022). Paid user most of that time as well. Basically Standard Notes, has become the goto-place for quick and dirty notes and/or notes requiring a higher level of privacy.

I use it in conjunction with OneNote, where Standard Notes is my little notebook, which I carry on me all the time. OneNote is my bigger, binder-sized, notebook, which is thematically organised. The binders are standing in my shelf - if people decide to peek into them, there is no harm done. My little notebook is just for me. In my pocket so to speak.

Standard Notes is where my quick and unfiltered ideas, shopping-lists and other things that I just need to write down in that moment goes. Without due consideration for security, privacy, cleverness or something else, since the service does that for me. Obviously I wouldn't be too happy with loosing a OneNote-binder or having it exposed to the public, but it will be closer to a minor inconvenience than a catastrophe...

So now that Standard Notes allows me to publicise my thoughts easily: Here I am. I may start blogging again. And if I do, I will probably write something more clever next time :o).

So the listed.to-blog writing through Standard Notes actually works really well. Especially since I'm already quite happy using Markdown in various situations, and Markdown syntax is working very well :).

But since Standard Notes is also a very privacy-oriented and secure note-platform, I couldn’t help but wondering if it is entirely clever to use the same application and method, to write secure, private stuff and to publish stuff for everybody to read.
It’s fairly easy to do (I’ve only do it from iPad) and the process is fairly straight forward. But I would like some form of check-mechanism, before publishing a note; i.e. the publish function allowing me to confirm which post is published, or some custom warning (I tag all my (potential and published) blog-posts with the tag ‘blog’, so it would be nice to get a warning if I tried to publish a post, without that tag).

My main issue, was that it was not that obvious to me, which of my blog posts were published, and which were still in draft mode. This could probably be managed using the folder/tag-function but still. Also I kindda missed a big red warning text, saying: This post is published. Any updates will not be published until you actively do so. And finally pressing the publish felt a bit like 'blind firing'. I would have liked to be able to enable a a: Are you sure you wan't to publish the note, starting with -function before it actually got published.

This scism in having a very privacy-oriented and secure note-platform and a publishing platform mixed bugged me. In the end my conclusion is, that I don't like it. So much in fact, that I migrated few non-Listed.to-related posts to a GitHub Pages-platform. It's still markdown-based, and even though it is less streamlined, that publishing through Standard Notes, it is still manageable. Even from the iPad.

But then... Then I found the Workspaces-feature in Standard Notes. While the GitHub solution was manageable it wasn't all that smooth. I liked writing in Standard Notes. I liked the ease of syncing. I liked the fact that I could have a dozen of drafts lying around effortlessly. So I was missing Standard Notes. But I didn't like the mixing of private and public. With Workspaces I have now created a new workspace. Running it in a different color - my main is running a dark color theme - the blogs a bright color theme. It is totally obvious which space I am in.

Moving a draft from my main workspace to the blog workspace, is a manual cut'n paste operation. It's fairly straightforward on either iPad or anything else. Of course having a "send note to other workspace"-option would be awesome, but I expect that it will have some undesired security implications, which would make this fairly unattractive. Plus it's not like I'm going to do it that often anyway...

It isn't the use that the folks of Standard Notes intended with the Workspaces. But it works. Transferring my username from my original listed.to - which were attached to my main account - to the Blog workspace was easy. It took less than 10 minutes in total. Workspaces are still in beta, so there is a possibility that something will break, and iOS implementation is not as smooth as on a computer, but it is certainly workable. So we'll see what the future brings. But for now I'm fairly happy and optimistic 😊.