I try to “be the change I wish to see in the world” and recently had a realization about what a pain it can be when I abandon a change I thought would be good for the world (and for me).
Here are a couple of my abandoned changes:
In ~2015,2 I decided to update this Infinite Ink website and use AsciiDoc as my LML.1 I chose AsciiDoc partly because I thought the tech world would be a better place if AsciiDoc, rather than Markdown, were the default LML. And then I wrote a bunch of articles in AsciiDoc and about AsciiDoc (to help spread the word about AsciiDoc). Unfortunately,3 Markdown won the LML battle and in 2024 I switched from AsciiDoc to Markdown and wrote about that in Why I’ve (mostly) Switched from AsciiDoc to Markdown. Now I’m often in the unpleasant situation of editing an older Infinite Ink article and using Markdown syntax when I should be using AsciiDoc syntax.😩
Fortunately, I feel good about – and have stuck with – most of my changes, including the ones listed below.
Please post ways that
you are
being the change
in the Discuss & Share
Lightweight markup languages include Org-mode markup, Markdown, and AsciiDoc. To learn about LMLs, see Wikipedia’s Lightweight markup language. ↩︎ ↩︎
In ~2015, I wrote about my enthusiasm for AsciiDoc in github.com/nancym/whoami/blob/master/whoami.adoc. ↩︎
I say “unfortunately” because there are many incompatible Markdown flavors that are supersets of Common Mark. This means that while Common Mark is well defined, Markdown in general is not well defined. ↩︎
I’m lacto-ovo vegetarian but someday maybe I’ll be vegan. ↩︎
Unfortunately, I can’t use cash for some of my online services providers. For example, I think I can’t pay Fastmail with cash (but I should ask them). ↩︎
By “physical place” I mean a place that is in the real-life physical world. This type of place is sometimes said to be a brick and mortar place, in meatspace, IRL, and in RL. ↩︎ ↩︎
My default web browser is qutebrowser. This is different from my primary web browser. ↩︎
“Free/libre” means “free as in freedom.” This is different from “free/gratis,” which means “free as in beer.” ↩︎