One reason I chose Write.as as my blogging platform is great support for technical writing with Markdown and MathJax.

I use Markdown all the time but haven't played with MathJax much, which I may need for some occasional simple math. So this post is a quick overview of how I write MathJax and what it renders like.

Editing and previewing MathJax

I love Write.as, but it has a few rough edges that introduce friction when writing MathJax.

There's no post preview and the only workaround, publishing an anonymous post and moving it to my blog when satisfied, doesn't render MathJax. This forces to go blind. Until a post shows up on the blog and I can fix any formatting issues, in the few minutes since publication and prior to the newsletter and the RSS feed entry going out.

I came up with an alternate workflow. I edit the math in the Interactive LaTeX Editor. This nice little tool supports MathJax, renders as I type, and has no ads.

Once the LaTeX source looks good, I copy the code from the LaTeX editor and paste it into the Write.as editor. If some LaTeX symbols have meaning in Markdown, such as _, *, and \, I have to go the extra step of escaping them with \.

At this point I'm ready to publish the post and tweak the math as described earlier.

MathJax examples

Time to kick the tires.

Let's start with some inline big \(O\) notation, say an algorithm that's \(O(n \ln n)\). I also throw in some binary numbers such as \(10010101_2\) and \(11010111_2\), and a simple calculation like \(2^{16} = 65536\).

Here is a displayed logical operation:

$$00000101_2 \wedge 00001100_2 \Rightarrow 00000100_2$$

The quadratic formula renders like this:

$$x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$$

Finally, the standard deviation:

$$\sigma = \sqrt{ \frac{1}{N} \sum_{i=1}^N (x_i -\mu)^2}$$

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I'm reposting here some content I published elsewhere, such as this and this. My journal will be my primary blog, so I'm consolidating here some of my other material. Which is an opportunity to revisit, filter, and revise old content.

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Write.as is such a low-friction blogging platform it enables me to blog daily. I love sharing my tech projects and experiences, and I can squeeze some writing into pretty much any time snippet.

But life threw at me something I struggle to handle.

The health of my old mom got worse quickly and she became no longer self-sufficient, requiring me to care for her continuously and full time. I love mom so much I even resumed using WhatsApp, I can do all it takes. But the current situation is demanding and exhausting, keeping me at the edge of burnout.

It's not so much I have little time to write. It's I don't have time to work on the projects and stuff I blog about.

I'm posting much less, but I still update this blog. I need it.

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Simon Wilson celebrated 20 years of blogging by featuring his most influential posts, describing his publishing platforms and tools, and discussing the evolution of his blog's design. Simon's software development career is equally impressive as he was a co-creator of the Django Python web framework.

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While I decide what to do with my old blog, I turned off commenting. I have always moderated comments and never let any junk show up, but these days the volume of comment spam is annoying enough to no longer justify the effort. Besides, socials killed blog commenting anyway and I haven't been getting any legitimate ones for years.

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Thanks tmo for the shout-out to my journal in his blogroll. Check it out, there are good blogs I didn't know about.

When I blog, I post mostly for publishing a record of my notes and projects I can reference later. Although I do every effort for creating interesting or helpful content, I write with not much expectation of being read, as I'm used to the typical platform algorithms burying me and not bringing many readers.

So it's really rewarding when an actual person reads my blog and finds it interesting enough to recommend it. This is why I appreciate tmo's mention so much.

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The more I journal with Write.as here, the more I consider abandoning my Blogger blog. Blogger introduces friction, is inflexible, has a stale design, and Google isn't likely to develop it further.

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I have been blogging every day for the past month.

Not that I set any goals, it just happened. When I started my journal, I signed up with Write.as after extensively researching a blogging platform. To reduce the friction between ideas and posts I wanted a Markdown-based, lightweight blogging platform with good support for technical writing.

It turns out Write.as has such low friction it enables and encourages me to write. I ended up doing it daily without plans or deliberate effort.

Up to a few months ago I wouldn't have believed I could do it. On my main blog I almost never posted more than a couple of times per week and usually less. I sent out my old newsletter once per week, and focused on curation rather than original content because I felt I couldn't sustain anything more frequent.

Write.as made it possible to produce that much original writing. I'll definitely take breaks, but this one-month milestone hints at a solid trend.

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I'm going to use Twitter less and focus on my journal and blog.

After over a dozen years on Twitter, I hit a growth ceiling: my follower count is flat and I'm invisible. Despite the occasional viral tweet, I get less than a hundred impressions and nearly no engagement per tweet.

I tried posting text, threads, media, links, replies, mentions, quote-tweets, lists, the works. Nothing makes a difference, no matter how good my content is.

The algorithms just don't like me and bury my tweets. Fair enough.

On platforms with a level playing field, such as RSS aggregators, I get an order of magnitude more visibility and engagement. After less than a month, my journal gets roughly the same views as after over a dozen years on Twitter.

I'll continue using Twitter as a source of content and discussion. But tweeting is a waste of time as nobody sees my content.

Instead, I'm doubling down on my existing blog and my new journal, where I post about the same interests I cover on Twitter.

I left the links to my journal and blog in my Twitter profile. I'd share them there, but social platforms did an effective job conditioning users not to escape their walled gardens and explore the open web, so Twitter would bury my link tweets.

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After test-driving Write.as on an Android phone, here I am typing this post on an external keyboard wirelessly connected to a tablet.

I'm using a Lenovo Tab M8 HD 8” Android 10 tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard. At under 150 EUR combined, both devices are pretty cheap.

I have the Write.as plain text editor open in the Chrome app. I'm no touch typist. But using a physical keyboard, even a cheap unit like this, makes a difference in productivity as it speeds up writing and editing.

Markdown formatting

Markdown support in the editor lets me type rich text such as bold and italics. I can enter lists too, here's a bullet one:

• one
• two
• three

And an ordered list:

1. first
2. second
3. third

Let's have some quoted text:

I'm afraid I don't have anything witty or memorable to say. This is just to show what quoted text looks like.

Where a physical keybord makes a real diffrence is with complex text formatting, such as a table:

Column 1	Column 2
1	2
3	4
5	6

Conclusion

A tablet, an extenal keyboard, and a lightweight blogging platform like Write.as make for a serviceable and productive on the go writing setup.

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