Friday Thoughts 02

31 Jan, 2025

As we land on the last day of the first month of the new year, I have another handful of thoughts to get out of my head.

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On Cinnamon & Brown Sugar Simple Syrup

Last night I made this brown sugar cinnamon simple syrup (not that exact recipe, I used another site and found this link after) - I wanted to recreate a mocktail I had when we went axe throwing back in November.

The mocktail consists of:

• Ginger Beer
• Lemonade
• Cinnamon & brown sugar simple syrup
• Of course, ice

I used Canada Dry ginger beer so the result was not quite as "spicy" as the one I had in November. I suspect Canada Dry's offering is super mild compared to "real" ginger beer; but I wanted something quick to give this a try and the fact that it came in mini cans was a bonus. I will try this one again, but next time I'll use a locally-made ginger beer.

And I tried this syrup in my coffee this morning...it's too sweet for coffee. I don't know how Starbucks does it to balance out the flavour profile.

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On blogging platforms

Earlier this week I was sure I knew what I was doing with my music blog: migrating it from WordPress to Micro.Blog. This was a couple of days after I was sure I didn't want to anymore, because of the fighting going on between people.¹

Today? Not so sure. One reason is that the cost I thought I was paying ($ 96) was actually for two years, not one; that works out to ~$ 4 a month. Mico.Blog would either be $ 1 or $ 5 a month - and the $ 1 tier was not recommended to me. Suddenly I'm looking at sticking with WordPress, for several reasons, but here are some of them:

1. I don't have to migrate anything. Leave the blog on the current platform, keep it simple.
2. I was saying that I didn't want to let public opinion sway my own thoughts on platform choices, and to remember "I am not my platform". Wouldn't that apply to WordPress, even though I may not agree with Matt Mullenweg's recent actions?²
3. $ 4 a month is pretty good actually, and I have the functionality I want out of the site already - so what's the advantage to migrating?

And now I find myself wanting to look into again migrating a WP site to a static site...I know you can do it with 11ty but I haven't wrapped my head around that (plus I said that I wanted an in-browser solution for posting stuff, like what Bear uses).

Confused.

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I'm getting back in the "mood" of writing about music. I haven't done it in a while, and usually not much more than 1-2 sentences about something I like. I've been listening to some different stuff from Bandcamp and even just doing that is helping me get into that type of writing mindset.

Full stop, I'm not "great" at writing about music (though one could should argue that there's no wrong way to write about anything), but I definitely enjoy talking about it when I discover something new and want to share. Usually that's in the form of a podcast, but I have less time to produce an hour-long podcast and find only music that is OK to play without securing licensing rights etc. Or editing music down to 30-second samples - a 1 hour episode could turn into several hours' worth of work.

I digress. What I'm trying to say is that I'm going to ramp myself up to talking about music. I have no plans on how often I'll do it, or what exactly I'll cover, but I know that I can't go from 0 to 100 right away. I need to slowly build things up. And listening to some fresh music helps!

I have music links that I saved that I will share in my notes for this week.

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#thoughts