A Brief Introduction

Hi! My name is James and welcome to my personal blog! I’m a public librarian, hobbyist web developer, and cat lover from West Virginia. Thanks for checking out my blog and reading this post.

tl;dr

I am starting a blog to have a place where I can post my thoughts in long-form. You can expect to see posts about library news, web development, and books!

Why start a blog in 2025?

I decided to start a blog in 2025 for a few reasons. Like many, many other people all across the country, I am trying my best to hold to this chaotic roller-coster that we’ve all been stuck on for the past 6 months. The dizzying amount information from news, social media, and the general internet has left me feeling like I’m incapable of even just remember any of it let alone understanding or using any of it. This feeling left me wanting to find a way to better manage this literal torrent of information.

I read (most of) How To Build A Second Brain by Tiago Forte earlier this year. In the book, Forte lays out a solid system for managing, understanding, and using the huge amounts of information that we all have access to. At the center of this system is the C.O.D.E approach. This approach has four simple steps:

  • Capture
  • Organize
  • Distill
  • Express

Each step is designed to help manage and ultimately use the information available to use to learn, make connections, and express your thoughts and opinions. If this is interesting to you check out more information at https://buildingasecondbrain.com. This blog is my approach to the express step. Ideally, it will provide me with a forum to express my thoughts, share my opinions, and use the mountain of information that I take in on a daily basis. What I like most about the idea of writing a blog is sharing my thoughts in long-form format! I am burned out with the torrent of short-form videos, posts, and audio.

So what’s this blog going to be?

Well… I don’t have a clear idea yet and I haven’t set a clear scope for what is blog material and what isn’t. At its most basic this blog will be a place to share my thoughts, opinions, and ideas on anything and everything that interests me. That’s a lot of distance to cover so if I had to say what I think you’ll find here it would include library news, web dev talk, and books!

Library News

I think it’s safe to say the libraries and librarians are under attack in every state and from the federal government. That includes public librarians. While I thankfully work at a library with a supportive director and library board that doesn’t exempt me from the mental impacts of seeing news day after day about a local attack on a public library or federal attempts to decimate agencies that support public libraries and museums. I have a lot of thoughts on this topics and you should expect to see those thoughts here from time to time.

Web Development & Computer Science

I describe myself as a hobbyist web developer and I have a strong general interest in computer science. I have been learning about web development and computer science on and off since 2020. I am always reading, watching, and listening to content about new tech, trends, and changed in the web dev world. I’ve built a few larger projects and many smaller projects since I picked up web dev and I am always eager to share what I am learning. Expect to posts about my projects and posts about new tech and skills I am learning here. I am already planning a post about my self-hosted blogging platform, Writr.md, in the future! Writr.md is the project that powers this blog and is my first step into the world of Next.js. I won’t go to much into that so check back for a full post about this project!

Books, Books, and Books

I’m not an avid reader but when I do read a book I am always eager to talk about it. I’ve recently set up an NetGalley account and think this blog (along with more trafficked places) would be a great place to share my reviews. You can expect to see some of that content here too!

Let’s wrap this up

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! I’m excited to get this first post online and get more online in the future.