Ok, so I ask myself why did I start this blog? And will this blog make any money?

My answers so far

1. Pay it forward

For my projects, I have leveraged the experience of other web-citizens that they have documented in their blogs. I hope this blog helps a reader to achieve their projects.

2. As a personal journal

I could make these notes and not publish them. In fact, I have been doing this for more than a year now, but the journal is messy, and the quality is ho-hum. Maybe if I publish it to the Internet there will be a forever-record, somewhat influencing me to up my game.

My journal started out with a purpose to document work in progress adequately enough that I could keep reasonable productivity after time away from the project - raising three young children takes priority over projects.

And then there is my desire to help my future-self fix what ever I have made when it eventually breaks.

3. To make money?

Well, wouldn’t that be nice. It would be great to share this bounty with the developers of the tools I use.

However it’s 2023, if I’m hoping for advertising revenue, I need to be on YouTube. I really don’t want ads on my site. Both because it creates a mess and I don’t want telemetry feeding my readers’ data to big-tech.

Am I running a business?

Not presently. This is a hobby.

If this endeavour became a business at some point in the future it may help to have some historical financial records. I would also need to review the licensing for the tools that I use, as initially I’ve started using them for non-commercial purposes. To keep my upfront costs down I will use free software where I can. As soon as the money comes pouring in, I’ll start purchasing the software licences. Some of this may need to be done retrospectively.

My tasks for today

1. Track my expenses
2. Track my licences

Track my expenses using markdown

A quick search and I found some python that imports markdown into GNUCash.

I ♥ markdown

I ♥ GNUCash

I have been using GNUCash for my personal finance since version 2.6 and I think it’s great. My favourite feature is that you can save the ledgers in a somewhat human-readable text-based file. I then sync to a remote git repository for backup and sharing. Post idea?

Back to the code

I haven’t tested it.

I haven’t forked it.

But I’ll start using the markdown format:

# 2022-11-29

$1.50 Ice cream
$4.80 Coffee

# 2022-11-30

$32 Groceries
+$60 John paid back

My understanding of the markdown parser:

• if the line starts with # then it parses the remainder of the line as a date
• else it parses before the first space as an amount and following the first space as the description and leading + is entered as a negative expense.

Done

Here it is in all it’s glory - my IoT expense tracker

Track my software licences

Another page to create: my software licence tracker

See you later-ciao!