Blogging via Email

I’d like to blog more, and specifically to write more short-form posts, but there’s sometimes an impedance mismatch between the maturity of a potential idea (low) and the effort required to create the corresponding post (high). It can feel like I have to get the F-35 out of the hangar for a trip to the corner.

I was originally drawn to Jekyll for blogging (posts were in plain text, were portable, it was customizable, had plugins, easy to host, etc). But that setup meant publishing a post involved — beyond actually writing the article — committing it to git, SSHing to my VPS, syncing the changes, running a deployment command. Of course that could all be automated, but even needing my laptop handy was a small hurdle that required additional motivation. I still do like having my writing stored this way, and I have written workflow tooling previously.

I recalled The Past, before certain social media sites had their attention extraction dials turned all the way up, and I was a regular user. The ability to make posts directly from my phone or any browser offered such a low barrier to entry that I could share ideas a lot more freely.

Maybe it’s a good thing that there’s an effective filter saving the internet from more literal low-effort posts, hot takes, etc. But I want this blog to be a place where I can share ideas, even if some of those ideas might be trite or underdeveloped. Basically I am embracing quantity over quality, because if it’s easier to write more, then I will write more, which will improve my writing (and writing is thinking).

So recently I wanted to make blogging easier while retaining Jekyll as the underlying blog generator. I like the idea of using email as an interface here, as it’s a cheap way to get rich text post editing and drafting. I wrote mail2blog, a small utility that reads an IMAP mailbox and creates posts from the emails. With a bit of extra scripting I can automatically publish these posts on a cron.

Hopefully this encourages me to write more, but even if not, it was at least a fun weekend project.