I pulled the coding card again today and carried on working on automating my general knowledge management workflow, basically how I take notes, organise ideas about things that I've read or written in the past and turn them into something new.
Today this involved fiddling again with Drafts to do something that's basically a mail merge, taking some structured data and inserting it into text. This used to be word-processing bread and butter, but I don't do it at scale in the same way. It's also about re-using stuff that I've already written without digging into documents. The philosophy of Drafts (or the bit that appeals to me) is that you write stuff without knowing what it's going to be and then when you do know, it will probably be more than one thing and so you can send it to different places. If you have several blogs and you want to post roughly the same thing to each of them, then you compose in Drafts and then just press a button to publish to each blog.
Talking of having several blogs, I was also pointed at sheet-posting (yes the pun is intended) which takes a set of Google Sheets and turns them into a blog. It's ridiculous and distracting, but I did learn a bit about CSS and also about Google Fonts, which for some reason have passed me by. Here's my effort.
It's late and I shouldn't really be writing, and it shows.
I also had a trip to Central London today. It's still weird. I took this picture by County Hall, of Westminster Bridge which at 5pm on a Tuesday would normally be heaving with road traffic, office workers and tourists, but today was empty.
Walking to Victoria Station from Westminster Abbey later on, it felt like it should be more like 11pm than 8pm. Even on the station most of the food and coffee outlets were already closed or closing. And there just aren't as many people there. I encountered a woman who was lost over the road from the station, looking for the Coach Station (a common issue in that part of SW1) and I walked her round to Buckingham Palace Road and pointed her in the right direction. She was going to get a coach to Bristol I said I hoped she got there before midnight. She said "There are just so many people here." And I'd just been thinking exactly the opposite.
On my way home, I realised that I'd just been to my third church service in as many days. I don't know what that means, if anything.
