I both love and hate reading the news; I like to stay informed, but the news often pisses me off. Even something as interesting as Sen. Al Franken being interviewed on Comedy Central. The Senator can’t help but act both seriously and funny at the same time, yet the political substance of the interview points out some of the more irritating aspects of Washington politics (I’m thinking here about a recent interview with Sen. Franken by Trevor Noah). Here’s a quote: “I like Ted Cruz probably more than most of my colleagues in the Senate…and I hate Ted Cruz.” Funny and cutting at the same time.

My other blog (pulamusic.com) allows me to comment directly on the news while also posting about music and whatever else hits me in the moment. So far I have also commented on a few Sun Ra compositions and printed some lyric transcriptions of Fela tunes. As long as the musical commentary continues I feel comfortable producing a wide-ranging blog. And while this current blog is meant to be pure freewriting, I won’t mind if the two blogs overlap thematically. As long as this blog remains freewritten I’ll be cool with it.

Blogging is a curious way of writing. I publish these posts knowing that nearly no one is going to read them. In fact, with the freewriting blog I am counting on nobody running across it. Publishing this blog is more about adding that public tension to an extended writing exercise that is essentially private; the public aspect pressures me to keep going while the private nature of the blog helps me to improve my writing.

The blog also helps me with my coding. While I am far from being able to write my own JavaScript code, I know enough to be able to search and copy code to achieve modest results. What I should do, along the way, is keep track of the little coding tricks I have learned along the way, since each example may be reusable at some point. Certainly I can re-visit any of the JavaScript exercises associated with the FreeCodeCamp front-end certification.

I recently figured out how to paginate this current blog, saving me from a seemingly endless front page. It would be nice, as well, to figure out a way to add a blog archive to a sidebar, much like WordPress does. I’ll have to search that one as well. A simple Google search led me to the code for the pagination (it was in the Jekyll documentation as well, but not as clearly explained as the dude I found on GitHub). The same search strategy may help me to create a sidebar, or it may not. FreeCodeCamp always suggests a Read-Search-Ask strategy. I read and search, but I haven’t yet had to ask for help on a public forum.

In the end, coding is just another aspect of my professional skill set, just like writing, teaching, and playing music. Digital Humanities is where it’s at.