I've been blogging for almost 30 years—from back when we called them "weblogs" or just "online journals," before "blogging" was even a term. This blog started in 2003 as a diary for my friends. Back then, the audience was tiny. Few people were online. Among them, few spoke Greek, and from them, even fewer knew what a "blog" was.

Then we discovered RSS Syndication—an early content distribution system that let readers subscribe to updates. We didn't use the word "distribution" back then, but that's exactly what it was.

Then social networks arrived and changed everything. They were easy to use and had built-in sharing features that made RSS feel complicated by comparison. Even with all this change, I kept my blog updated, even if not as often. I'm glad I did. Going back to posts from 20 years ago is a real treasure, and I can also point people to my old writings when needed.

Over the years, my blog evolved from a personal diary into my content repository. When I experimented with platforms like Medium and later Paragraph, I always copied the articles back to my blog—keeping everything in one place.

These days, Farcaster is where I publish most regularly. It's so much easier to post a quick thought there—whether it's short-form text, photos, or videos—than to create a full blog post.

That's where bckt comes in. It includes bckt-fc, a tool that makes it trivial to fetch a cast and convert it into a blog post. It will even fetch attached images and videos and store them locally inside the posts folder (in bckt, a post is a folder containing markdown and other assets). It also has special templates to render these posts (for example, with no title).

It's easy to build these small tools for bckt, and I'll probably build more. For example, I'd like to build one that takes a photo as input, reads its EXIF data, and creates a post with the date and location—or maybe a gallery if multiple photos are provided. Or use an MP3 file and its embedded ID3 tags to do something similar for podcasters. (If you've built one of these, let me know!)