Newborn Sleep Patterns

Welcome to my digital garden

I’ve long lamented the inactivity of my website - but not for lack of trying. In the old website, I had 10 drafts sitting in the inbox queue, but could never bring myself to hit publish because they weren’t exactly as polished as the other posts from almost a decade ago.

Also, the whole publishing process as quite laborious - I didn’t have an easy way to just go from my internal Notion ideas to the Quarto website that I set up last year - I had to be at my laptop, completely focused, to publish anything, which is a rare occurrence now that On Newborn Parenting|we are of child.

I think I’ve found a good solution, by creating a digital garden:

  • This lowers the barrier to entry and publishing of ideas, I can keep them knocking around in the digital garden and make sense of all the information before I publish them into the writing section of my website, and
  • I’ve integrated all my thinking into one tool (my Building a Second Brain|second brain for both thinking and publishing in Obsidian and its Obsidian Publish service. If you go to my site now, you’ll see that it’s changed to that form. I’ll write more at length about this setup in the future.

So, that’s inspired a fresh new attempt to revive my regular newsletter habit.

Privacy-friendly Google Analytics?

I wrote about Nerfing Google Analytics to be more privacy-friendly. As I revamped the website, I thought I’d turn to free tools, as opposed to my Plausible Analytics self-hosted setup.

But it’s no longer as simple as slapping Google Analytics on the website and calling it a day due to changes in privacy regulation. This post writes down how I’ve managed to lock down all the unnecessary ad tracking and data sharing agreements to keep my Privacy Policy|privacy policy as simple as “I collect anonymized analytics on pageviews so I can make the site better, and nothing else.”

Newborn parenting

I wrote a short piece On Newborn Parenting and the various adjustments we’ve had to make as a result of now having a beautiful daughter in our home.

Reading highlights

10 Thoughts From the Fourth Trimester by Tim Urban · Highlights · Original

This was a hilarious point of view of Parenting from Tim Urban of Wait But Why fame. My favorite points were:

  • The labor experience for couples and how they are wonderfully mundane compared to what we see in the movies.
  • How newborns are basically fetuses outside the womb and they aren’t cute at all until they’re actually babies at 3 months.
  • How there is no regulation at all around parenting despite being completely in control of a child’s life

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton · Highlights · Original

As I got deeper and deeper into building a second brain, I’ve turned my focus to my website and how it’s gotten so stale. A digital garden is all about lowering the barriers to publishing my moving away from “articles” and “essays” where everything must be perfect, to publishing field notes or other unfinished work for continual refinement in public. Maggie Appleton describes this style of publishing excellently and with amazing pictures.

As Filipinos Crave More for Local Java, Philippine Coffee Farms Brew a Plan by Isabel Martinez · Highlights · Original

Philippine Agriculture has always been about rice - not even increasing yield or reducing distribution costs - just about import tariffs and trade controls. It’s great to see that despite great odds the coffee industry in the Philippines has started to see green shoots, thanks to increasing domestic (read: robust and less recession-sensitive) demand for artisanal, high value coffee, and an increase in coffee productvity.