Posts I didn't publish this decade

Aaron has a great idea. Let’s do this.

I have 64 draft posts that have been hanging around since December of 2011. Here’s a handful of them either listed individually or grouped in some way.

Draft titles that would have made great blog posts

This is literally the title of one of my draft posts. Its draft text contains the titles of three other draft posts that have no content and should be written, but never will be:

• “A parallel universe in which the consumer rejected the concept of fast food” – December 6, 2012
• “It’s like Tinder but for car-sharing” – January 19, 2018
• “Political books and Property Brothers” – September 18, 2018

Pedicord, Meier & Frank – The Great Portland Dynamite Caper

When we moved to Portland in 2011, the Meier & Frank building quickly became a favorite of mine. I poked around on the internet for some background on the building and ran into this wild story from 1955 where a blind man planted 12 sticks of dynamite in the men’s rest room—which then exploded!—and demanded $50,000 to not do it again. They caught him by matching typewriter samples at the post office!

Somebody should write that story.

2011, A Year For The Epic Books

This Is Back When I Embraced Title Case.

2011 was an intense year. We sold all of our stuff, left our jobs, traveled around a bit, landed in Portland, I found the WordPress community, and landed a gig at 10up.

I think I decided I wanted to do a reflection post of some kind. The full text of the draft that I never finished: “2011 was a big year.”

Related honorable draft post mention: “2015 Is Over OMG”.

Beer recipes

• “Homebrew Batch 2: Zack’s Imperial Sasquatch Stout” – January 5, 2014
• “Blackberry Michaelmas – Blackberry Belgian Session Stout” – January 6, 2015

The sasquatch stout actually has a grain bill that I may be able to work from. Maybe I should publish it. 🤔 The other one is just a bunch of Wikipedia links to Michaelmas.

Related honorable draft post mention: “Gin Recipe”, which is someone else’s recipe for a mixed drink that I copied down.

Feature requests

Sometimes I think about things that I want in software that I use and then I start a draft post so that I can forget about it.

• “Footnotes For Twitter Would Be Cool” – January 5, 2014
• “I’d like a way to sync Simplenote to WordPress” – January 3, 2018

General how-tos

I try to keep notes for some mundane things so that I can figure out how to do them again in the future. I should probably just publish some of these.

• “Setting up a new server”
• “Switching PHP versions in Valet”
• “I’m going to setup my Yubikey now”
• “How to change the DNS offered by DHCP on a Netgear Orbi RBR50”
• “Setting up Laravel Valet for my local development”

Technology decisions

“Using Firefox (6 months)” is about 6 months out of date. Now that I’m approaching a year with Firefox I should update the post and publish.

“Replacing Google Search with DuckDuckGo” is about 10 months old and DuckDuckGo is still my primary search. I should update this and publish.

“A Facebook free 2019” was prescient and a reaction to a couple of NY Times articles last December. Without ever going back to this post, I ended up deleting both Facebook and Instagram.

Okay. I think that’s 20 of the 65. The others are either actively in progress, just random words, too heavy for this post, or plain uninteresting. It’s harder than it should be to stare at a bunch of drafts drafts and try to categorize them on the fly. Now it’s time to do some cleanup!