I Built a Blog and Forgot to Write
25 points by benj
25 points by benj
Sveltia CMS link is dead.
I also spend far more time tweaking the blog engine or the CSS than writing content. But that's part of the fun.
thanks for the heads up about the link... fixed :-)
I think I eventually stopped having fun tweaking my blog... because I might enjoy more talking!
It happens to us all. I remember going through similar issues ... oh god! 27 years ago when I was writing my own blogging engine. I was trying to get it perfect, got fed up, and decided to go with what I had. I'm still using it, 27 years and 111 releases later (last changes made this past May when I finally got my PUT method script fully working).
lost in tooling."The hardest part of design is keeping features out".
Mandatory read: https://IndieWeb.org/manual_until_it_hurts
This is interesting. I’ve seen companies write in their job postings that they want you to write some kind of tool for anything that you had to repeat more than two times or something like that. I personally never understood this because most of the time after I have done some repetitive work, I will no longer need to do that exact kind of work again, or maybe I will, but by that time it would a little different and if I wrote a tool it would need tweaking or rewriting.
Just FYI when viewing your blog on a wide enough window your nav-wrapper is making the first 100% visual height of your blog be covered by a dark overlay
<div class="nav-wrapper fixed inset-x-0 top-full z-40 flex h-full flex-col justify-center bg-(--bg) pb-16 duration-200 select-none lg:static lg:h-auto lg:flex-row lg:bg-transparent! lg:pb-0 lg:transition-none">
</div>
^ this one
Works fine on smaller screens/mobile of course...
This is very relatable, since I decided to rewrite my blog in pure HTML and CSS last year. I did this in large part to make it as broadly compatible as possible; or at least, it should work fine with my Kobo Clara Colour's web browser. However, this meant both being very restricted with what HTML and CSS features to use and not really being able to use any frameworks at all; the few CSS frameworks that would work were so minimal that using pure CSS wasn't that much more difficult anyway.
After implementing a CSS-only gallery like in this post (though it has a bug which scrolls the page to have the gallery at the top), I got hung up on getting a working CSS-only image comparison. I haven't had the time or motivation to have another crack at it and start writing posts again. Currently wondering if I should go back to using a SSG, but I'd need some way to tell the SSG that certain portions of a post are a specific type of aside/note.
Appealing. What companion tools do you use?
E.g. I enjoy html-tidy[1] and (my) https://mro.name/pagerake [2]
[1]: package https://www.freshports.org/www/tidy-html5
[2]: Help screen: https://codeberg.org/mro/pagerake/src/commit/9d5bf870/prake.ml#L20-L60
None! So far I've been rebuilding the site with just editor (usually Kate) and MDN docs in Firefox.
This is my usual workflow with the rewrite:
There used to be a separate staging subdomain, but the delta between the main site and this got so large that it didn't make sense to keep having a staging site as soon as the essentials were done. It'll prolly return in the future, most likely when I get around to adding an Atom feed; I don't think it'd be a good idea to make frequent changes to the main site once there's a feed.
interesting, I couldn't do without tidy. But I do without git etc. - my hoster keeps daily zfs snapshots for a year. I usually write directly on the webspace (sshfs mounted). Fine for me.
Oh, and I have a microformat to ics converter in place, too, to provide a calendar: https://mro.name/uf2ics
See result here: https://Unix-Freunde.mro.name
I use Jekyll with a custom theme on my site, and it works down to IE6. While you get stuck with using old HTML (thank you IE,) you can use some modern CSS as long as you keep progressive enhancement in mind. I've even managed to have both a dark and light theme on modern browsers!
The nice thing with Jekyll is that when theming it's basically just writing HTML pages with some extra markers for where it should put the page content, and you have access to a pretty powerful templating engine.
I'd say the biggest downside to Jekyll is that it's written in Ruby. Thankfully I've never had to dig into the code.
Currently wondering if I should go back to using a SSG, but I'd need some way to tell the SSG that certain portions of a post are a specific type of aside/note.
Jekyll supports including templates, with optional parameters, in your markdown posts. You can also tell it to use a different template entirely for a page/post, if you wish.
A few years back I read the devlog for the incredible indie game Return of the Obra Dinn. When asked why he was using Maya LT instead of Blender for 3D modelling, the developer Lucas Pope replied:
Blender scares me a little bit personally because it's open source and there are no limits to what you can fix yourself. At least with Maya LT I can say "this is unfixable and I need to work around it and move on." With Blender I could spend days editing the actual source or writing elaborate plugins. Fun but counterproductive.
I remember reading that comment and feeling VERY seen! I'm one of those people that almost always gets sidetracked trying to fix bugs when I encounter them, in the process losing sight of my more important goals.
This kind of discipline is no doubt one reason Lucas Pope has had such a successful career as a solo developer!
Going through this exact process as of right now, I can only agree. Results and processes can be heavily intertwined, though. It’s true that I do not care that much about the process of building my blog, but I know that this process will make for a far better result so I sit through it. I’m fine with what’s hidden. But the façade, I am willing to put the effort into, because I care so much about the result.
Fair. I think that LLMs have allowed us to outsource parts of the process that are uninteresting or that we only care about the result thus allowing us to focus on the process that are worthwhile for us... In spite of all my reservations towards LLMs, I think that that has indeed been a positive
Oh. That sounds interesting.
Where can I find an LLM that will deal with office politics, promo packets, stakeholder meetings, and sprint planning so that I can focus on understanding problems and writing code at a comfortable, stress free pace?
I mean. Just about any LLM will be ok at those. Especially if you adopt my general strategy of say nothing
Thanks for sharing.
Thinking about my own stack, I’m coming up on 20 years using the same SSG. I feel a little smug about that.
I really want to blog more at the moment but I’m struggling. I thought it was being out of the habit but I wonder now if there’s too much friction in my setup. I recently added description fields to blog posts (so they show up in link previews) but that’s another thing to have to do…
Nice, software with that longevity is indeed something to be a bit smug about! :-)
I guess the key insight for me was, do I want to write and say stuff, or do I want to have the nicest blogging software configuration... and realized that I primarily wanted to write!
Ive had the same problem so much. I find it so easy to get caught up in the building of a perfect system/process and completely lose sight of the original goal. One of the principles that has been a good antidote for me is "Let form/structure be emergent". Start by just doing the thing a bunch with the shitty hacky thing you've got right in front of you already, and then the structure and process and optimizations emerge out of actual experience with the thing in question. This also has the nice upside of helping me understand the problem space before i jump straight to planning the perfect process without actually knowing what the process really is.