These are my notes about everything
I sat down at the computer and fired up a new post for Hugo in Emacs, forgetting that yesterday I switched back to Kirby. So it's going to be that kind of day, I guess.
Just because you don't like something, doesn't mean it's bad.
Every picture you have ever admired was taken on lesser equipment than is available today.
-- unknown
I take a photo of this loading bay every time I go to founders, usually with a film camera. Today I only had the GRIII so I used that and applied my HP5 preset in Capture One. Saved me a lot of time, actually.
Andy Baio The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams:
In June 2023, the servers just started returning errors, making nine years of member contributions inaccessible, apparently forever ā every post, artwork, song, portfolio, and the community built there was gone in an instant.
How did this happen? What happened between the idealistic manifesto above and the sudden shutdown?
Itās a story so old and familiar...
Ello was fun for a while, but like so many others became just another reminder that manifestos and good intentions are often meaningless in the long run.
So a few days ago I moved this blog back to Hugo. I like Kirby, but I missed the "standard" Markdown frontmatter and my old Emacs workflow. I prefer a fully static website, so Hugo makes sense.
Except no. Hugo would be perfect if all I wanted was to grab a theme, render static pages and push them to a web server. But heaven forbid I want to make any changes to the site's behavior. Even after years of using it, I find Hugo's template system and language to be an unfathomable and confusing mess. Maybe I have a mental block, but nothing I do works on the first (or second or third...) try. There's a lot of documentation, but I can't make sense of it.
One thing that put me off Kirby CMS was that its "Kirbytext" markup enhancements to Markdown would make the content less portable. Thing is, Hugo suffers the same problem because every theme developer uses their own front matter variables. Is it "cover" or "featuredImage" or "feature" or what? And Hugo's shortcodes are just as much a risk of lock-in as Kirbytext. Hugo's advantage here isn't as great as I thought it was.
So, you may have noticed I've rolled back to using Kirby. Even though I had to build most of it myself, I feel like I understand it. Also, I like the design and behavior more than that bare-boned theme I was using. And if I want to change something, I'm not afraid to try.
I swear some days I want to single-handedly bring back single-use devices.
Remember when I usedĀ wttrĀ to show the weather like this?
_`/"".-. Light snow
,\_( ). 8(-7) Ā°F
/(___(__) ā 14 mph
* * * 3 mi
* * * 0.0 inHistorically, the day after getting a COVID booster, I would feel pretty crappy. So far this morning Iām only suffering from a sore arm. This one was from Pfizer rather than Moderna, so weāll see.
I waffle between wanting a boring, simple, clean blog and one thatās fun and wild and odd and playful. My heart says the latter but my head says the former. Head wins for now, I guess.
Could I have aĀ DenoteĀ plugin forĀ LogseqĀ please? I donāt even know it should do, but I want one.
Yesterday I wrote thatĀ Iāve lost interest in everything. A few people reached out to make sure I was ok. That was so nice. The blogging community is wonderful, isnāt it?! I just want to say that, yes, Iām fine. I was just noticing that I was feeling in a bit of a funk and writing about things helps me think through them. Thank you all for the encouraging words.
Watching my GoAccess logs on the new server, it looks like around 50% of the visits to my blog are via RSS. And there are surprisingly few 404 errors.
I had my annual physical today. I left with the Doctor saying, āI have no concerns.ā which Iām happy about. My momās family has a history of Cardiomyopathy, also known as āDutch Heart Diseaseā, so I mentioned this again and this time he sent me for an EKG and chest X-Ray. The results already came back with āI see no issues with your scansā so whew. My blood pressure is a little high but my Cholesterol is normal. Now if the blood work comes back clean Iāll feel pretty good.
I like theĀ PaperMod theme, but I donāt want it toĀ lookĀ like the PaperMod theme. Or at least not like everyone elseās PaperMod theme. Itās just that I suck at layout/CSS so if I decide to dive in Iāll get frustrated and things will break.
Right now Iāve installed the theme as a Hugo āmoduleā. This is an easy way to do it, but it might be too much an abstraction for my taste. Another option is to check it out as a git submodule, but that has its own issues.
A third option, and the one Iām considering, is to install the theme in my themes/ folder but not as a submodule. Iāll just roll it right into my repo and pretend itās mine :). This makes updates more work since itāll no longer be a simple āhugo mod -uā or āgit submodule update ārecursive āremoteā. Iāll need to diff and merge by hand. This is fine, since sometimes themes break after updates.
This way Iāll have local copies of all of the themeās templates and I can edit them at will.
Please allow me to gripe for a moment.
Over the past month or so, Iāve noticed that my reactions to things are generally, āMehā.
I used to eagerly fire up my RSS reader to see what fun, cool things I could learn about. Lately, I just scroll aimlessly through my feeds, skim a couple of posts, shrug, and move on. Nothing is interesting enough to stop me in my tracks and send me on an adventure. That used to happen at least once or twice a day.
I roll my eyes at each new ācrisisā on social media. Not because I donāt care about things, but Iām weary of people posting their (typically uninformed) takes on every little thing.
I havenāt picked up a camera in weeks. My photos are boring. And Iām finding other peopleās photos boring as well, and that never happens.
Finding a show or movie to watch is an exercise in time wasting and scrolling and watching trailers. Iāll find something, watch ten minutes of it, and quit. Same thing with books, and IĀ loveĀ books.
The only reason Iām still blogging every day is for lack of anything better to do. IĀ switch blogging platformsĀ all the time, but itās just a distraction with no real goal.
Winter doesnāt bother me. The short days are fine with me. I canāt blame the weather. Iām just in a funk and I need to pull out of it because this isnāt much fun.
Our near-blizzard conditions continue today. Alice had a hard time finding a place to poop on our walk this morning.
My OpenBSD experiment that I (almost) ended has been going surprisingly well. I've got most of the basic settings configured and I have a real window manager (xfce) running. The whole idea of setting up the laptop is that it will be a bare-bones system for mostly writing/blogging/browsing. Should be easy, right? Just Emacs and my org directory. Except no. I need a bunch of dotfiles, espanso macros, passwords, git, and some shell scripts all synched. Lots of work still to do, it seems. Syncthing is running, but that was a trick. Now to work on dotfiles, since I hadn't been worrying about synching those for years now.
I can't remember why I switched to managing the blog via a local Kirby instance. Probably because I was doing so much customization that the content vs code syncing was confusing me. Now that development changes have settled down, I'm using the server panel for publishing. I'll cross the how-to-sync-code-vs-content-changes bridge with I get to it.