Blogging on Janusworx

Moved From Papermod to Blowfish

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:30:00 +0530

Intended Audience

Me.
This is a sorta-kinda living document, a record of my idiosyncratic decisions to first move to, and then bend the Blowfish theme to my needs.

Update (2026-07-24) : RSS updates, Miscellanea, some editing.

Blowfish theme logo

I changed my blog theme from Papermod to Blowfish.

Why move to Blowfish?
#

Papermod, to my mind, is perfection. And I outgrew it. That’s all there is to the why.
Papermod caters to the needs of a blog, and I think my blog is slowly turning into a multi section website.
I want menus, and possibly submenus and Papermod does not do them.
The finished outcome, while not as pretty and uniform as the old Papermod site, makes writing and managing it all, much simpler.

Blowfish specific things for future Jason to note.
#

Big Picture things
#

The theme does a lot. Most of which I don’t think I need.¹
The aim is to match what my site looked with Papermod, as closely as possible.
Everything CSS is in assets/css/custom.css, rather than multiple CSS files as it was with Papermod.
Pagefind powers search on the site. The inbuilt search is disabled in main.toml.
Footnotes use Littlefoot; so they appear as popups, and the need to scroll up and down the page is reduced.

Configuration
#

Blowfish separates everything out in its config. Lots of toml files in there.

Base config is in hugo.toml, theme parameters are in params.toml, menus in menus.XX.toml and language + translation related stuff is in languages.XX.toml ²
main.toml sets the theme, the baseURL and I’ve added a section to limit RSS entries to only the last 50 items.
The author parameters along with the social link set, as well as the logo, are in languages.XX.toml. I have duplicated them. One for EN and one for FR. The logo that it requires, is in the assets/logo directory.
Menus and submenus in menus.XX.toml. Duplicated. The English menus have English names and the French, French ones.
Parameters; the header is set to basic. Every other option creates a sticky header of some sort. Lots of other changes. Most are self explanatory. Turned off “Hero” options everywhere, to stick to a plain, basic layout as much as possible.
My split of the various configuration files for environments (base, development & production) have stayed the same with no changes.

Content Structure
#

Directories and subdirectories for each section.
Make sure each section has a corresponding index.XX.md for static pages or _index.XX.md for list pages. This, I think (but am not sure) has fixed my old, nagging issue of page navigation overflowing. I would keep going next, in the Talks section for example, and when I reached the end, it would show me another entry from some other section. Now the front/back buttons stay restricted to the section they are in.

Archetypes
#

All the archetypes have been slightly tweaked. They now also include a template line for an image. It uses the theme’s figure shortcode for images.

i18n (Internationalisation)
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The internationalisation options are easier here. Just defining a term somewhere and then referring to it here just works.
For e.g., I use search_placeholder as a term in the search layout and then in i18n/en.yaml I have, search_placeholder: "Search for something …" while i18n/fr.yaml gives the same term a different spin, search_placeholder: "Rechercher des articles …"

Layout Overrides
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RSS
#

Have tweaked the RSS layout a teensy bit. My version is in layouts/_default/rss.xml, which includes the full text of the post, instead of just a summary.

<!-- <description>{{/* .Summary | transform.XMLEscape | safeHTML */}}</description> -->
 <description>{{ .Content | transform.XMLEscape | safeHTML }}</description>

Have restricted RSS feed generation for posts in the Notes and Miscellanea section. They won’t appear in the RSS feed unless I want them to. Most of them are just streams of consciousness, to help me get on with my day. Only a few are exceptions, that I want published.
I even disable sitemap generation for those “important to me, but useless for thee” posts with this bit of metadata in each post³

sitemap:
 disable: true

So I have then taken advantage of this fact, to exclude these posts from having entries in the RSS feed, by telling Hugo to only look at posts where such a key does not exist; which basically, is everything else.

<!-- {{/* range $pages */}} -->
 {{ range where $pages "Sitemap.Disable" "ne" true }}

Search
#

This pulls in the script and the styles for Pagefind, which I use for searching the blog. Layout is in layouts/_default/search.html.
Also note, then when working on search locally, first create an index with pagefind and move it to the static folder because our normal way of working is to render it all in memory.
- do a hugo build
- then do pagefind_extended --site public
- then mv public/pagefind static/pagefind
- then rm -rf public
- and then start the hugo server like we normally do

Littlefoot
#

Footnotes are powered by Littlefoot. Have used layouts/partials/extend-footer.html to pull in the Littlefoot script and layouts/partials/extend-footer.html to grab the CSS.

Redirect
#

An old redirect template to redirect from one section to the other is still in place in the layouts/redirect directory

Shortcodes
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Most of the old shortcodes made it over. Retired my image and caption shortcodes in favour of using Blowfish’s version. Also created an hsgallery shortcode, so that I could continue using my old Hugo Shortcode Gallery to create image galleries. The gallery shortcode conflicts with Blowfish’s own, which I don’t like and so won’t use.

Static + Tools
#

Fonts and Littlefoot reside in the static directory, along with all my images.
There’s also a tools directory which contains the Pagefind binary. This does not get published obviously. But the Forgejo action uses this to generate an index for the site and then sends the whole thing off to the VM.

Themes
#

Contains Blowfish and Hugo Shortcode Gallery, added as git submodules. I dropped Hugo Admonitions, because Blowfish has them already.

CSS
#

All in assets/css/custom.css

Import fonts: Valkyrie for the site and Source Code Pro for code.
Tweaked the Janusworx up left on my site, and changed all the nav bar items to use Valkyrie Caps.
Dark mode links were not contrasty enough. So changed the colour and added an underline on hover.
Added a class to the figure tag, so I could center the pics I use.
Added an indent to the numbered list items on the Annual Book List pages, so that the numbers stay under each month.
Style littlefoot footnotes, so that the button is slightly smaller and higher, and the notes use Valkyrie, along with a couple of other tiny tweaks.
Style the Blowfish box, and the results, on the search page
Main thing to note. Use !important; liberally. Changes don’t always cascade down correctly.

Miscellanea
#

Go Templates:
#

Use ```go-html-template as the language hint to the code fence to display Go template code correctly. (like I needed to in this post for e.g.)
If it is pure Go Template stuff with little to no html, another alternative is ```go-text-template
I could not just comment out Go template code with HTML comment markers . The Hugo live server kept crashing on me with weird EOF errors, until I figured this out. The Go template block needs a comment marker inside the the {{ … }} section like so, {{/* … */}}.
E.g. {{/* range $pages */}}

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.
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famous last words! ↩︎
XX is the language code. I have EN for English and FR for French. So menus.fr.toml for e.g. ↩︎
I have modified the notes archetype, so this is always pre filled and set. ↩︎

Blog Questions Challenge 2025

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:10:17 +0530

Ava started this, Kev modified this, and Saptak egged me on to write this. So here goes …

What the home page looks like in 2025

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?
#

I write for me mostly. Because writing helps me think. My thoughts are too scattered otherwise. I can’t not write. I’ve always written. Privately, publicly, there’s always been some place where I’ve jotted things down.

2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
#

I use Hugo to generate the site, which I host on my own Hetzner VM. I use it because I outgrew my previous tool, Nikola, which still holds a dear place in my heart. While Hugo is enormously complex, it is also deceptively simple enough to get started with. And it’s fast. That’s what I love about it. It lets me write. It does not get in my way. It lets me preview what I’m doing with its live server. And it’s unbelievably fast.

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
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I’ve been writing in some form or other since the late 90s. So … yea :)
Livejournal, Blogger, self hosted Wordpress, wordpress.com, Posterous, Tumblr, self hosted Wordpress, self hosted Ghost, Nikola and now Hugo. It’s been quite a ride!

4. How do you write your posts?
#

I write them in Emacs (in Markdown, using Markdown Mode) on my desktop, with Hugo Server running alongside giving me a preview of what things will look like. Once I commit it to my self hosted Forgejo instance, an action publishes the site automatically

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
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I never do. I write because it helps me function. And yet, it always feels like a chore.

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
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I always publish it immediately. I almost never write something that is deeply thought out, that needs to stand the test of time. It’s the process, the writing, the putting words out of my mind, through my fingers down to paper, that leads to the result, the thought, the opinion, the aha, the insight. So I’m never quite done. Which means if I ever wait for finished, the post will never get published. The moment I publish something, is invariably the moment something needs changing. So I just go back and edit it. I never notify folks about updating things on the first day. If I ever edit something much later than a day or two, then I do.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?
#

None. All. They’re my thoughts, so depending on my mood, they’re either worthless or priceless gems!

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
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Not really. For all my wandering, I’ve only ever moved when my tools outgrew me¹, or I outgrew my tools. For now, Hugo does all I ask of it, without getting in the way. The day that changes, will be the day I move.

I’ll ask Priyanka, Sreeram, Sandeep, Pradhvan, Rahul, Bhavin, Elia, Mandar, Saptak, Farhaan, Robin and Kushal to share more, if they have the time, energy and the inclination.

Folks, who’ve answered my call to arms! Go read their answers too!

Robin
Elia

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain or [continue the discourse here][3].

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Wordpress.com too restrictive, Ghost stopped serving my specific needs etc. ↩︎

Note to Self, My New Heuristic for Blogging

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:43:28 +0530

Rain lilies, from Abby’s tiny window garden.
They bloom only around this time of the year, on the onset of the monsoon.
Click the pic, for a bigger image

I love to write.
Correction, I need to write.
Writing helps me think, to be deliberate about things, to slow down.

At the same time, writing is also a slow, plodding process for me. Every post seems to take forever. So many years of doing it and it does not get any easier.
I agonise over what I want to say, the picture or quotes I want to include, the overall arc of my thoughts, the structure, everything has to be just so.¹
I’ve lowered the bar, to build consistency, with my #100WordHabit and now I have a new problem. First, I could not get started, and now I cannot stop once I get started.
I just have to finish my thoughts, my post, and that sometimes takes hours.
Which brings me back to me not wanting to start, for the fear that nothing else (that are in fact, more important) will get done.

This in turn, brings me to the brainwave I had a couple of days ago, in the bath.²
The pressure comes from wanting to publish what I write, the day I write.
What if, I didn’t?

Nothing has to change. With the exception of a hard stop.
One hour.
One hour to write and publish.
Or one hour to write and then put my pencil down.
And then I can come back to it the next day.
Yesterday’s post was the result of this approach.
I wrote it over two days, in two one hour sessions.
Very like Abby’s rain lillies up up above. They are prepping through the year, to bloom at this time, every time. Just because I cannot see it, does not mean nothing’s happening

One downside, that I potentially see, is that I will use this as an excuse to slack.
I hope I don’t.
But then on the other hand, without a pressure control valve like this, I can very easily see myself burning out again.

So let’s see how this goes.
I’m betting on me being a rain lily.

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback at this domain

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

The end result might not be any good, but my mind needs to be satisfied, that all is to its liking and that I did the best I could ↩︎
Don’t we all? ↩︎

Mandy Brown Celebrates Fifteen Years of Her Blog

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 08:28:03 +0530

This was a thread on my fediverse account, that grew too long.
Posting it here, all together, the way my thoughts spilled out.

All I knew about Mandy Brown when I began following her a year ago is

she has a doggie called Furiosa
she thinks about books the way I do
she reads books and then writes about reading them, the way I always dreamed I could
she’s a prominent member of my circle of the Eminent Dead

Today, as she celebrates the quinceanera of her blog, I realised that she also:

is an awesome people herder
is one of the forces behind A Book Apart
is one of the leading lights of web design world
has put in time as a suit (CEO)

Which leads me to understand how she writes so resonantly.
It’s not just her beautiful mind, but also that she writes with her scars.

From her celebratory post,

And this is a home, in more ways than one. There are books here that have taken up residence in my mind. Or perhaps more accurately, I have lived long residencies within them, have curled up under their eaves and stretched out on the porch, have explored the basements and attics and crawl spaces. I read on paper still, so the evidence of time spent is visible in dog-eared corners and coffee stains, in curling covers and the occasional broken spine. I’m hardest on the books I love the most, so that more than one of them is neighbored by a newer edition: not replaced (because I would never forsake my margin notes) but accompanied by a copy that will decay in its own way, soon enough.

And maybe that’s a good way to think about blogging, too. The new stuff sits next to the old but doesn’t supplant it, doesn’t shove it out of the way. Each new post lays atop the next like sediment, and all the old layers remain exposed for you to meander through, with their mediocre sentences and lapsed claims, all the sloppy thinking ever on display. It’s a great exercise in humility, keeping a blog for this many years. But in exchange for the keen awareness of how far I still have to go as a writer, I have the space to keep going. I have the home to keep coming back to. And I will. I will return, again and again

Thank you, Mandy!
For all you do, for all you’ve taught me, for the worlds you’ve led me to, and the all the dreams you’ve shown me.

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.S. I now have to go catch up with thirteen to fourteen years worth of writing. There goes June!
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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
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Setting Canonical URLs in Hugo

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 21:57:42 +0530

I steal quite a bit from other folk, to put on my blog.¹
Case in point, is my last post where I stole the image from Tom Gauld.
Or a few Seth Godin posts, somewhere on the blog, that I have posted in their entirety.

While I do credit them in the post, I wished there was a way, I could programmatically tell the search engines and the bots of the world that I did in fact, steal from someplace and that they should actually be looking over there and leading people there.
A little bit of searching, reavealed that there is in fact, such a way to do it.
It’s called the Canonical URL.
In a nutshell, it tells the machines to guide folk there, because that is the source of truth.

And this is where my move to Hugo came in handy.
Hugo makes doing this a breeze.
The idea revolves around processing a canonical tag that we add to the front matter of said post.
Like so …

canonical: "the source html link to the original content."

Now to have Hugo process that, we add the following code snippet to the head section of our blog’s template.
In my case, I copied head.html from my theme’s layouts/partials folder to my own layouts/partials in the blog’s structure and modified it by adding this code block.²

{{- if isset .Params "canonical" -}}
 <link rel="canonical" href="{{ .Params.canonical }}" />
{{- else -}}
 <link rel="canonical" href="{{ .Permalink }}" />
{{- end }}

And that about does it.
I stole this code snippet from a CloudCannon blog post.
And if you check the HTML source for this post of mine, you’ll see that the canonical site, does indeed point to CloudCannon’s site.

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

because just being on the web, for as long as I have, I know bitrot is a thing. ↩︎
if you do have a canonical line in the post, make sure to comment it out ↩︎

All About the Move to Hugo

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 13 May 2022 20:00:00 +0530

I finally got done, moving the blog from Nikola to Hugo today.
I already wrote about why I did it.
These are a few more thoughts about what went into the endeavour; and some colophonesque details.

One, really small hope, is that it will help me learn Go.
The DevOps world that I now seek to enter, speaks Go.
I also, now run two Go programs that are indispensible to me, Hugo and Miniflux.
And being the control freak, that I am, I’d love to tweak them to just how I like it.
Nikola did help learn me Python, after all.

Speaking of Nikola, I’ve used it for close to four years now, until I moved.
I was a refugee from a self hosted Ghost install. ¹
I love it to death.
It’s done all I’ve asked of it … and more.
And it’s been fast and stable all these years.
The community (primarily Chris) have been kind and patient and really helpful.
Chris and Roberto and the rest of the gang, have built something rugged and enduring.

So other than having something fun to do while I was down in the dumps, why did I move to Hugo?
I like to learn by reading.
So other than practicing Go, the best way to learn it would be to read code.
And what better place to read code, than that of the tool I use to write? ²

Another point, is that I probably outgrew what Nikola gave me out of the box, and customizing it (and learning how to) was something that I just couldn’t quite wrap my head around.
While Hugo is probably the same way and its documentation is not quite as structured as Nikola’s, it is pretty popular and I can get answers to what I want to do, really, really quickly. ³
And Hugo has an awesome book, to learn from.

So, how did the move go?

I wrote a tiny bespoke Python script, ⁴ to convert all my Nikola front matter to Hugo front matter.
That took me half a day, but it converted 677 posts, that I was dreading, I’d have to do by hand and would take me weeks.
I wrote another bespoke script to convert some gnarly tags that Hugo choked on.
And just like that, my biggest boulder just fell into place.
That left me free to write a couple of what Hugo calls, Shortcodes, to ease my writing.
I started with shortcode (a custom horizontal rule) and ended up with four! ⁵
I customised the base as well as the theme’s config to make the site look like I wanted it; (from its various options.)
And I added some custom CSS, to have custom horizontal rule and footnote styles, change the look of the links in the menu up top, style my subscribe form, and
Included the beautiful font you are reading this in.

In a word, slow, steady, iterative progress until I was done.

And who and what inspired me and who do I owe gratitude to?

Priyanka Saggu, for egging me on to do this project.
Bhavin Gandhi turned me onto the awesomeness that was Hugo.
Pradyun Gedam for making me green with envy, with his minimalistic blog and the thoughtful touches he made. ⁶
Navendu Pottekkat, whose code, ~~I stole~~ helped me style my subscribe page.
Bjørn Erik Pedersen and Steve Francia and the rest of the gang, for making Hugo
Aditya Telange, for the making the pretty, pretty, little PaperMod theme.
Kushal Das, for sharing my love of typography and beating me to a custom font on his website.
Matthew Butterick, for the gorgeousness, that is Valkyrie. The site originally used the beautiful Charter, but while it looked fetching on Windows and MacOS, it would not render as nicely on Linux machines. ⁷
With Valkyrie, that no longer is the case. I have something beautiful to look at, all day! ⁸
Robin Williams, for teaching me all about CRAP and everthing I know about type and design.

They decided to move their editor away from being purely Markdown. I get why they did it. But it just wasn’t for me. I wanted something simple. ↩︎
sorta kinda, like learning about cars, by looking under the hood of your own car, like in the old days ↩︎
even with something as weird and esoteric as the site refusing to build, because of emacs crapping in the content folder ↩︎
related post coming later … ↩︎
the aforementioned horizontal rule, two to center images and captions and one for my subscription ask at the bottom of the post. ↩︎
Nearly everything I did here, I cribbed from his blog config ↩︎
which ofcourse, is where I spend my entire day. ↩︎
I was hesitant to plonk down the money for Valkyrie. But I forgot all about that, once I saw my words rendered in the font. So, I am chalking this down to an investment. Besides Matthew’s prices are value for money (I’m just a little broke at the moment, hence the quibbling) and his usage license is generous. ↩︎

Begin Again

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 06 May 2022 20:23:09 +0530

Moved over from Nikola, to Hugo today.

In two minds about what to do with all the old posts. Do I just shed them all, like I’ve done in the past? Or work to move them over?

Maybe, tomorrow’ll bring clarity.

In the meanwhile, this is a house under construction, y’all!
Stuff does not work, stuff looks wonky, and stuff both, looks wonky and doesn’t work.
I’ll be at it, on and off, over the next few weeks, trying to make this home.

Why did I do this?
Because I’ve been in a disheartening rut of sorts.
The long slog, to switching careers and all the learning that goes with it, is weighing me down.
So I wanted to do something fun.
Ergo, Hugo’s my new toy.

The blog looks the way it does, thanks to the good people at Hugo Headquarters and Aditya Telange’s PaperMod.
And I know of all this fanciness, thanks to my two young friends who run Hugo themselves, Bhavin Gandhi, and Pradyun Gedam.

A Transcript of Seth Godin’s Akimbo Episode on Blogging

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:20 +0530

If you haven’t subscribed to Seth Godin’s podcast already, well then what on earth are you doing? I’d written about it here on the home blog and you can go subscribe here.

This episode (Season 2, Episode 1) on blogging is very important to me. I think it’s a distillation of all of Seth’s thoughts about writing and blogging in a crisp, crackling 20 minute episode.

I wanted this for permanant reference, so I thought, I’d transcribe it for myself, and then I thought, well, if it helps me, it’ll surely help others.

So here you go.
It’s all Seth below …
P.S. Typos and errors, omissions and emphases, entirely mine.

At the end of May, 2018, I moved my blog.
I moved it to a new platform.
This is a little bit like moving to a new house, except it takes longer, it’s more emotional, and it’s a lot more expensive.

Hey, it’s Seth. And this, is Akimbo.

Moving my blog is a metaphor for a lot of things; about being found, about how ideas spread, and about the passage of time, in a fast moving world where the culture is driven by the Internet, and the Internet … is driven by the culture.
The last time I moved my blog, was 16 years ago, when George W Bush was president, when Alicia Keys had her debut album and when the bestseller list had names on it, like James Patterson and Stephen King.
So some things change; some things … not so much.

Before I had my blog on Typepad, I used to deliver it by email and I’d been doing that since the 1990s.
What I discovered then, what I wrote a book about, is the simple idea that:

Anticipated, personal and relevant messages are more likely to resonate with people, than spam.

Day by day, week by week, I built up a list of people, who wanted to hear from me, who wanted to get an email newsletter from me, back in the day, when newsletters actually had stamps on them.
I understood, from seeing the work of Esther Dyson that an effective newsletter could completely change the game.
The goal isn’t to reach a lot of people, the goal is to reach the right people, and to reach them in a way, where they are glad you showed up.
Anticipated, personal and relevant, means, that they would miss you if you didn’t show up; that’s my definition of permission.
Earning the privilege … you can’t take it, it’s not a right; there’s no such thing as free speech—when we’re not talking about the government. This is earned speech.
Showing up with a message that people want to get, drip by drip, day after day.

At the time, my emails didn’t come out everyday; that would have overwhelmed most people in the information starved 1990s, atleast compared to today.
When I began it was twenty people, getting a newsletter about the struggling entrepreneur they knew.
Then it was twenty-five.
Then it was forty.
Then, it was a hundred.

This led to my second big insight:

Ideas that spread, win.

In the late 90s this magazine showed up, Fast Company.
I decided, Fast Company was the greatest magazine ever published.
I also decided that my life dream, was to be a columnist, for Fast Company magazine.
I figured I had something to say, and I figured that was the place to say it.
I sent a note to Bill and Alan, the founders, the editors and I told them, I wanted to write a column for them. I offered to write it for free. Alan wrote back a really nice note saying, “We’d love to, except, we don’t run columns.”
Well that didn’t deter me, so I started writing a column for Fast Company, even though they didn’t have columns.
Every week, I sent Alan & Bill, a new column and by the time, I got to, I guess, the eighth or ninth week, their ad sales had started to go up and they realised they needed more editorial to sit next to all of those ads. So they said, “Sure, Seth. If you want to write for us, if you want to write thousands and thousands of words for us, for free, we’d be delighted to run your column.”

I was thrilled. I made a decision then and there, that the goal of the column was to write some thing that people would xerox, in an old fashioned Xerox machine and put one in the slot of every person in the mailroom, in the old fashioned mailroom, the old fashioned slot, the whole idea that there was an office to begin with. So instead of people forwarding it by email, (which was unheard of), people were actually copying a column and putting it in other people’s mailboxes.

Ideas that spread, win.

Month after month, my column grew in its impact. Fast Company grew, in its impact. And that lesson has not been forgotten. That what we can do, is serve a small group of people, with an idea that they want to share.
Why do they want to share it?
In case of my Fast Company column, the reason was this:
I was telling them something, they already believed, they already wanted to be true, they already wanted to share.
My job, was to write it in a way, that made it cogent and easy to share.
And so they did. And if that resonated with some other people, they joined in.

Few years later, I was at a conference. I met Joi Ito there. He was on the board of a company called Six Apart. I saw for for the very first time, what the Typepad platform looked like and I moved my blog to it, a few weeks later.
Here’s the thing.
Google changed everything.
They changed everything in a way that most people dont see or understand. Most people use Google to find things. They assume it is telepathetic. They assume, that all they have to do, is type in a few simple words, and Google will comb through the entire Internet, and find them exactly what they’re loooking for. Most people never get past the first page of results on Google.
Well it’s so popular, so many billions of searches are done, that everybody, who makes a thing, who has a service, who wants a job, who needs or wants to be found … wants to be found by Google.
There is a haystack, the biggest haystack in the history of the world, and each of us, each of us who wants to make a difference, who wants to be found—we’re needles.

And so there’s a problem. There’s a challenge.

And the challenge is, getting found for a generic term. Right, if I search for “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and Google does its job right, I will actually find John. But most of the time, that’s not what people search for.
Most of the time, people aren’t sure what they’re looking for and they want Google to find it for them. And so, in every town there are a thousand plumbers, with sharp elbows, hoping that they will be the first match for the word, plumber. And in every industry there are consultants or there are freelancers or there are companies, big or small, waiting to be found.

At the beginning, Google’s algorithm was pretty primitive. It wasn’t particularly difficult to cheat your way to the front of the line, to play in ways that the Google algorithm liked a lot and get more than your fair share of visits, from the hordes of people, searching, for the likes of you.

And so we began this striation, this sedimentary approach; people at the top, people in the middle, people at the bottom, not because they are worthy, not because Google has done a site visit or the Department of Health has verified them, but instead, because they got good at getting found.

This is often called SEO, Search Engine Optimisation.
It’s a weird term. Optimising who? Optimising what?
Well, the search engine is Google and what we are optimising is the way, our website looks and feels and is seen by the other people in the world, so that Google will pick us.
And it’s led to all sorts of weird side effects. People twisting themselves into knots, not seeking to serve the customer, but seeking to serve some sort of mythical wizard, inside the box, that calls itself Google.

So what does this have to do with blogs?

I’ll get to that in just a second.
At the beginning, the genius of Google’s algorithm was this—they didn’t rank pages, based on what was on the page. They ranked pages, based on what people who linked to the page were saying. So if a lot of people linked to a page, saying this is the best hotel in all of Ghana, then if you search for “best hotel in Ghana”, the Google algorithm should have found, the page they were all pointing to.

If you wanted to be found then, the idea of writing blog posts that were often shared and spread, made an awful lot of sense. Because instead of just one website that just sat there all day, everyday the same, you were writing a blog.
A blog about this and a blog about that.
So for eight years, if you typed the word blog into Google, my blog, was the very first match.
Now it’s important for me to state, that I didn’t write the blog so this would be true. I wrote the blog, because after I left Fast Company, I wanted that same experience.
The experience of people, xeroxing my posts and putting them into the office mailboxes. Of course, no xeroxing, just email.

So I was writing for the very reason, that people were linking. I was writing so that people, would spread the ideas.
No ads on my blog. Rare calls to action.
That’s not what it’s for.
What it’s for, is to teach people, to show them something.

But, back to this challenge and how the culture changed.

Because what happened was, people who didn’t belong, for whatever reason you want to measure, number one in anything, decided that being number one was so valuable, they would spend their time and their money working to be number one as opposed to working to be better, working to serve people, better.

And thus, SEO developed a bad reputation.
The idea was that for a thousand or five thousand or fifty thousand or a hundred thousand dollars, you could game the system, so that you would get more links than you would (quote) “deserved”, that you’re exposing many of the failings of the Google algorithm, because human beings weren’t actually looking at your site.

Once it became worth millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars to be ranked number one in Google, an arms race began. That arms race brought in good operators, bad operators, people who were playing for the right reasons and people who weren’t.

But what we saw in all of the hotly contested areas, things like hotels or travel or things that we might buy, or services or obscure terms, were people who were subverting the very idea behind the search engine.

It was then, that Google made an interesting choice.
I’m not sure what I would have done in their shoes.
But it was a two part choice. They didn’t really understand how the algorithm began to work, because it got too complicated. More than three thousand people, were hand tweaking, the way Google was scoring pages. So Google pretended,

a. They knew exactly how it worked and
b. that no human beings were actually making these decisions. It was simply the algorithm. “Well it’s not our fault you moved down, it’s the algorithm”. “Oh, it’s not our fault, that this hate term is number one in results. It’s the algorithm.”

And somehow, though all of this is nonsense, it also undermines their responsibity, because once they are the middleman, the monopoly on how peple find stuff, they do have a responsibilty to keep their promise and give the best possible results.

But we’re here to talk about the change that each of us can make, and I think the key insight is this

You cannot trust, that your needle is going to get found in the haystack.

You cannot trust that, any generic word, the word you seek to own, butcher shop, shoe store; pick whichever one you want, is going to end up with you on top.
And if you’re not on top, if you’re number twenty, or number fifty or number hundred, you might as well be invisible.

The alternative, is to win when someone searches for you.

So, if you look for Seth, you’ll find me.
If you look for Seth Godin, you’ll definitely find me.
If you look for Newton Running Shoes, you’ll find the people that make Newton Running Shoes.
So the game goes from, “How do I persuade Google to find me, when someone is looking for the generic?” to “How do I persuade the public to look for the specific?”

And so, as we enter this post Google age, where clearly there’s room for more than one winner for every noun, how do we have a chance to change the culture?

And the answer is this.
The answer is,

Change the people you engage with, so much, that they want to tell other people.

Have them want to tell other people in the specific, not in the general.

You may have heard me talk about one of my favourite examples: The Poilâne Bakery in Paris.
Run by Apollonia Poilâne, the daughter of the late Lionel.
This bakery is extraordinary. Lines out the door. A premium product enjoyed at most of the fine restautants in Paris.
If you search for bakery, you will not find it. Not easily.
But if you search for Poilane, there it is, right up top, where it belongs.

So that’s the mission.
The mission is to write things, create things, post things, engage with things … that people choose to share.
To earn the permission of people they share them with.
The permission to follow up, the permission to teach, the permission to engage,
And then share some more, and then teach some more, and do it in a way that people will share it again.
And then people will share it again.
And then people will share it again.
Each time, earning you more permission.

Because, trusting the middleman on the Internet; that’s a dangerous game.
That if you are building your content on Linkedin or building your content on Facebook, you’re sharecropping.
That you’re working for a landlord who does not care about you.
That has no contractual obligation to keep their word.
That at anytime they can say, “Oh! You know all those people you have permission to talk to? Your followers? your friends? We’re going to start charging you money to reach them. Wanna boost this post?” That’s a lousy deal.
That what we have to figure out how to do, is engage with a platform that has an obligation to us.

That was my relationship with Typepad.
And I’m super grateful, that in the sixteen years I was on their platform, they kept their end of the bargain.
I happily paid them, whatever it was, $20 a month, because that money was repaid to me again and again, by a third party that had my interests at heart, a site that was up almost all the time.
It worked. Because I was paying for it.
I wasn’t the product.
I was the customer.
And my job, on that platform, was to be a teacher.
My job, on that platform, was to teach, was to make it easy for people to find me, if they were looking for me.
Not looking for the generic, but looking for the specific.
And then, to earn their attention and trust, and to keep a promise.

I discovered that five to ten years ago, I was blogging three times a day.
I was sort of insane. I don’t know what kind of caffeine I was drinking.
I realised that my promise was out of hand.
So I made a specific promise.
I said “Once a day. That’s it. I’m not going to overwhelm you. Once a day, I’ll be here.”

And I’ve been there everyday, since then.
Partly, because I have something to teach, partly because I have something to say, partly because I have something to share.
But also, because I made a promise.

Anticpated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

Drip by drip.
Day by day.

So I’m grateful to all the people, who worked so hard, to help me build this new platform for my blog.

But waaaaay more important than that, I’m encouraging each one of you to have one.
Not to have a blog to make money. Because you probably won’t.
Not to have a blog because you’ll have millions and millions of readers. Because you probably won’t.
But to have a blog because of the discipline it gives you, to know, that you’re going to write something tomorrow, something that might not be read by many people, it doesn’t matter.
It’ll be read by you.
And that if you can build that up, ten at a time, twenty at a time, a month at a time, day by day, you will begin to think more clearly.
You’ll make predictions.
You’ll make assertions.
You’ll make connections.

And there, they will be, in type, for you to look at a month or a year later.
This practice, of sharing your ideas, to people who will then choose, or not choose to share them, helps us get out of our own head, because it’s no longer the narrative inside, it’s the narrative outside.
The narrative that you’ve typed up, that you’ve cared enough to share.

So SEO’s fine. If you win at SEO, Congratulations!
I’ll send you a postcard, maybe a medal and a ribbon.
It’s great.
Someone needs to win at every single noun, anyone could search on.
But it might not be you. It probably won’t be you. The odds are against it being you.
A twelve year old, probably should not grow up saying “I will not be happy, unless I am the champion of the world at this sport or that thing.”
Because the odds are too long.
It’s not worth betting your happiness on that.
That if we’re going to change the culture, we’re going to have to figure out how to bypass the generic Google search, and instead reach a few, the smallest viable audience, the group of people we seek to serve, to connect those people with each other and with our ideas in such a way that we become the specific, not the generic.

Because if you’re specific enough and generous enough and consistent enough, it’s worth the journey.

Thanks for tuning in to Akimbo.
I hope that you will subscribe and tell your friends.

Blogging on Janusworx

Moved From Papermod to Blowfish

Why move to Blowfish? #

Blowfish specific things for future Jason to note. #

Big Picture things #

Configuration #

Content Structure #

Archetypes #

i18n (Internationalisation) #

Layout Overrides #

RSS #

Search #

Littlefoot #

Redirect #

Shortcodes #

Static + Tools #

Themes #

CSS #

Miscellanea #

Go Templates: #

Blog Questions Challenge 2025

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place? #

2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? #

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before? #

4. How do you write your posts? #

5. When do you feel most inspired to write? #

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? #

7. Your favorite post on your blog? #

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.? #

Note to Self, My New Heuristic for Blogging

Mandy Brown Celebrates Fifteen Years of Her Blog

Setting Canonical URLs in Hugo

All About the Move to Hugo

Begin Again

A Transcript of Seth Godin’s Akimbo Episode on Blogging

Why move to Blowfish?
#

Blowfish specific things for future Jason to note.
#

Big Picture things
#

Configuration
#

Content Structure
#

Archetypes
#

i18n (Internationalisation)
#

Layout Overrides
#

RSS
#

Search
#

Littlefoot
#

Redirect
#

Shortcodes
#

Static + Tools
#

Themes
#

CSS
#

Miscellanea
#

Go Templates:
#

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?
#

2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
#

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
#

4. How do you write your posts?
#

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
#

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
#

7. Your favorite post on your blog?
#

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
#