Why I Switched My Blog

I learned about a principle of composition...well, actually, it's about basically anything!

When we're in the right setting and have the right tools, our effectiveness and efficiency increase. The reason that the new blog system is special is because the input format is much simpler than HTML. Normally when I'm writing a blog post, there are three things that take the most effort and time:

1. Composition and content - what will I write?.
2. Translation - Translation takes more than half the time that was already taken to compose an original post.
3. Content formatting. Formatting content in HTML is really annoying - it's for a computer to read, and though it's easier for a human reader than the majority of other formats that exist, it still takes time to do!

Recently I discovered some word processors specifically for users who write books/novels. It was really interesting to see all of the different features they had, but I got to thinking about why something simple like a traditional word processor, like Microsoft Office, wasn't good enough for some. I realized hat the requirements of writing a book in an organized way is very different from writing for a college assignment, which is what I'm used to. When one's needs are different, the way to resolve them also changes. That's why I decided to attack my needs of composing posts on a blog- the mre time I can focus on what's important for the blog is that much better for its readers!

So! The new blog has the following features:

• Composition with Github-Flavored Markdown. This is a text format that can be converted to HTML and look basically what it looks like in a simple text editor. In other words, composing and focus on post content composition is much easier. This reduces a lot of the time taken by items 1 and 3 above.
• Separation of posts and their corresponding translations. This lets me make translations independent of the original post, which makes focusing on the content easier. Markdown also makes it so that formatting is much less work to get the same between other translations.

This doesn't resolve everything, but just reducing the time taken in the process of writing gets me excited to do even more. That's why I decided to focus more on developing the new blog than a few posts some time ago. Focusing on needs and on points that need to improve the most is the most effective way to progress, and I hope to learn more as the blog and how I communicate with you evolve even more. As Julian said:

--Erich