Why (he) blogs

In mid-2007, when I started blogging over there, I detailed the reason why I was doing it: in essence, I had some free time, and decided to give blogging a try. Never really thought I'd stick to it. But it turns out I did stick to it, and the reason is simple: writing---instead of just "thinking"---forces you to discipline and organize your thought. The reason I'm getting back at this right now, is because I found a great blog post that gives you a great couple of other reasons to blog. Following the one I already mentioned, here's the one that most resonated with me:

Blogging is a bit like public speaking, and people are scared of it for good reason. You are really putting yourself out there. 

If you do it right, you will stay stupid things every now and then. You will piss people off.  It's scary at first to hit Publish and push your ideas into the public sphere. 

In the process though you will learn how to live with a thick skin and how to confidently state your opinion. You will also come to be more zen about putting yourself out there in general. In my opinion, these skills are essential for good entrepreneur and hard to learn elsewhere.

Have fun reading.

TiddlyWiki

It's small, it's powerful, it's awesome. TiddlyWiki (TW) is a one-file personal wiki, that can be used as a notebook, a journal, and (quite possibly) everything in between. It does have a few setbacks though. The biggest one, is that some configurations, like the username, and default tiddlers (TW word for post), are stored in the browser as cookies. Which means that if you don't save cookie, or change browser, those settings will be reverted to their default values---not good. The solution is using persistent options. In my case, I store these options:

chkAnimate: true
txtUserName:
chkSaveBackups: false
chkAutoSave: true

One thing that I have *never* been able to do in TW, is installing plugins automatically---it always fails. Which, it turns out, is not big of a deal, because there's a really simple alternative! It doesn't work for some complicated cases, such as SyntaxHighlighter---which, by the way, is a must have plugin if you're a programmer---but for the majority of plugins, it works flawlessly. Another must-have TW plugin, if you write any math at all, is the Mathjax plugin. I installed it via the alternative method I mention above.

It can be customized ad nauseaum. Most of the settings are stored in special tiddlers tagged with systemConfig. This is the case for instance, with CSS (tiddler named StyleSheet, with no tag associated). There are also a bunch of themes, for you to choose from. Have fun!