So the words don’t always come easy. I’ve been looking at this blogging interface for longer than I want to admit. The day’s been pretty uneventful, but I’m not ready to break my posting streak quite yet. Probably going to play some video games and head off to bed.
August 2021
Tuesday Thoughts
Boston is still there in case anyone was wondering, but didn’t want to check themselves. I checked. I’m nice like that.
With errands officially run, there’s not much else for me to do today. I have to contact a few people and then I’m gong to tweak a few things on here.
Read the first Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells while on the train. I liked it more than I thought I would as it avoided almost every easy joke it could have made with it’s premise. The world building was tight and the characters were fully drawn and had that “I know people like this” quality that didn’t draw attention to itself. That’s not an easy thing to do. Especially with a main character that still needs to feel “non-human.”
There was one thing in the ending that I didn’t like, but the story telling itself might pull me into the next one. We’ll see how a feel in a few hours, but the smart money is on me reading them all.
Another Slow Start
My bones are tired and I had to wake up anyway. Have to drag bones into the city. Might be back later. Or tomorrow. Bones.
No I Will Not Speak English
So I thought I’d finally get to why I moved from a Jekyll install to a WordPress site for this blog. Settle in because this might get slightly technical.
First, WTF is Jekyll? And if you do know what that is, why would I be moving from it to WordPress when usually it’s the other way around?
Jekyll is a static site generator, which is a command like tool that takes template and text files and assembles them into website files (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). This methodology is part of a larger concept called JAMStack that’s basically moving away from backend processing for websites and sticking to simpler technologies that have been around since the birth of the web.
This site was hosted on GitHub Pages service of GitHub, which is a code hosting repository. And was a way for me to get this site up with almost no money. (I just had to pay for the URL.)
So why leave?
Because this wasn’t all of my setup. Jekyll is just the command that the processing at GitHub used to compile my site when another command line tool called Git told it to. Also, Jekyll doesn’t have an interface. This meant that if I wanted to add a new post, I would either have to write it as a text file and upload it to GitHub using Git, or find a third-part web app to act as an interface and CMS. I opted to for the latter and used the simple but quite nice CSM Siteleaf.
But this doesn’t control the layout, which meant that I had to use a templated theme that if it didn’t do what I wanted I had to edit the code myself. Even that required some doing because Jekyll is just flat script, so if I wanted to recode the theme to give myself a new feature I might have to install a plugin for the Jekyll so it could understand it.
This also came with it’s own challenges because GitHub doesn’t allow most Jekyll plugins with the basic GitHub Pages setup so I would have to create a new subsystem using GitHub Actions that would trigger on update to build my site with the configurations I wanted.
And If I wanted to do something crazy like add a sub title to a post, I might have to change the entire CMS layer because Siteleaf might not understand that functionality to add it to the interface even though I coded it into the theme directly.
This is all before we get into things like view counts and comments with both would require two separate third party apps that I would have to integrate.
You get the idea.
The real reasons I put myself through all this was as a personal challenge to make it all work cheaply and because my old blog was feeling stale and I wanted to start again with a slightly new concept. Something more immediate and a throw back to when personal blogs felt personal.
And that worked, by the way, for a long while. It felt great to pull all these parts together from scratch and will this site into existence. I learned so much working with JAMStack technologies, and there are a lot of people that believe that things like Jekyll sites are the future of the web and I largely believe them, even now.
If you’re a full on web developer and running a business that sets up digital storefronts for others, there’s really not a faster way to do that once you get your tooling down. And unfortunately, that’s what most of the web is turning into: store fronts and cash registers for businesses.
Why go back to WordPress?
In a world where I can go anywhere, why go back to WordPress? It’s getting a reputation in web dev circles as being a really bloated piece of software. Maybe that’s true, but I really love it and always have.
It does almost everything I want out of the box – generate the website and allow me to edit it within the same tool! – and what it doesn’t do straight away is handled by like one or two plugins.
While I was setting all of this up, I looked at my profile on WordPress.com and found that I joined in the end of 2006. That’s only one year less than WordPress.com has been around. I remember finding it and thinking, “a tool that lets you make a site with posts AND PAGES!!! For free?!!” Every web project that I’ve made since then has been either a hosted or self-hosted WordPress site. I read their update blogs when I’m not working on a site and get exited.
Their one of their a tech company that still holds my values of openness and inclusion. And by now I know the tool pretty damn well.
So I was the only person who was surprised when I finally went back to WordPress.
And they didn’t even make me feel bad about my time away.
Grandpa Millennial Yells At Noise
There’s an old social convention comparing website work to construction. I can remember when people were in the process of updating their sites, they’d put up jaunty gifs of construction workers always with the phrase, “pardon our dust.”
I bring this up because I’m still tried from staying up late working on my website and now there’s actual construction work happening outside my window.
The irony is not lost on me.
I think the only logical thing to do would be to go for a walk. They can’t be doing this shit everywhere in town. Not that I can get everywhere in town. Moving slow today.
The Refresh Is Complete
Okay, that’s a lie, but it’s better than saying “The user facing part of the refresh should be kind of done maybe.”
As stated earlier, I’ve moved this to WordPress from a Jekyll install on GitHub pages. Again, I’d love to do a run down of why I moved to WordPress from a JAMStack style site, but I still have a lot of backend stuff to do, so again, I’m going to put a pin in that.
Anyway, I wanted to whip off a quick “hey it works!” post. Now back to it for me.
Don’t Call It A Refresh
One the themes of this blog has been the site refresh as the current Jekyll theme isn’t everything I want. I’ve been picking at this project off and on for months, and have reengaged in earnest a few days ago.
However, I’ve decided to rebuild the entire site as a self-hosted WordPress Blog for arcane reasons that I’ll go into in a later post.
Assuming, of course, I don’t brick the entire data repository and have to start over. (Which I can tell you won’t happen quickly as I stare at a wall for months trying to figure out where shit went wrong.)
So today I’m going for a walk to clear the head then it’s into the heavy lifting of importing all of this content into the test instance I have running on a Raspberry Pi.
This might be a heavy post day.
8.8.21, Currently
- Playing: CyberPunk 2077
- Reading: Once Upon A Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
No Maps For These Territories
Just finished a major video game jag. Been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the last few weeks. I want to finish it before any new content comes out for it, but I’ve set this weird rule for myself that I have to have all of the side quests and missions done before I can finish out the main story line.
Luckily the publishers, CDPR, are taking their time to put out new stuff for it.
I’ve been playing the game on and off since I picked it up last December. (I played day one on a base model Xbox One, and it was a buggy mess. I am very brave.)
It’s been quite enjoyable, so I’ve been savoring it like a fine wine because we aren’t likely to get 80’s style cyberpunk on this scale ever again. As it turns out, reality caught up with our anxieties over the worst impulses of the Regan’s America. But the maps never included boring and banal the dystopia would be.
One of the most striking things about the game is there are no suburbs, which we now know was the birthplace of most of the problems cyberpunk was trying to warn us about.
Still, there’s something cathartic about running around a future that’ll never be, which is commenting on a present that is all too real.
The Suicide Squad
Well… that was actually unexpected. Just got done watching watching The Suicide Squad on HBO Max, and I was shocked at the quality jump between that and the first one. I knew it was going to be better because they hired James Gunn to write and direct. Considering WB hired a trailer house to chop up the last one to make it more like Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, this was good – if surprising – call.
What can I say? The movie is well made and smart but that’s not why I like it. I like it because it is the weirdest thing to come of the Hollywood system in years and it shoves three hours of movie at you in two hours and never feels rushed.
It’s real strange and is the kind of stuff I used to make up when I was 14. Makes me happy to know there’s still a place in this world for weird and wonderful. I’d go see it if I were you.