Nightly Blogpost Time

I work second shift, currently, which puts me going to bed at like 4-5AM, sometimes 6-7 depending on my shift. Naturally, no sensible motherfucker is up at this hour, which gives me a lot of time to do nothing but write code and dump my thoughts.

I'm really enjoying just how much thoughtless (thoughtful?) garbage I'm able to throw at this terminal in a night. It really helps precipitate my thoughts into more solid opinions, for sure.

But enough about that.

Today was pretty nice. Played a lot of modded MC and wrote up a good few pages documenting my setup. At this rate, I'm probably gonna decomm the dokuwiki and just write it all out here. Looks a lot cleaner over here.

I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of minimalist webdev. Regardless, my current workflow is... messy, to say the least. I really shouldn't be dicking around knee-deep in HTML for every post when I could write a small preprocessor. I really need to sort out deployment, too. Currently, I just remote into the server and sudo git pull the site down every time I write a post, which could be hella automated. And then there's the entire concept of actually working on a feed, which is insanely difficult to do given my workflow.

See, one of the things I want this site to be (and not necessarily the child sites on this domain) is stateless. I want to be able to clone the repo to a webroot and launch Apache and just have my site. No fuss, no mess. Now I've already broken this paradigm by including modpacks in the webroot in the gitignore'd /files directory, but I'm willing to exclude 200MB binary files for the sake of sanity. But as such, I don't want anything on the box to generate the feed without my intervention.

I suppose I could automatically generate the feed with a script based on the contents of files in here. It shouldn't be too hard to just copy the contents of a couple tags over in a Python script. And I suppose with that I could just nail a new entry to the top of the file, make a commit, and push it alongside the post.

Maybe this workflow isn't too bad. Just needs a little glue is all.

I'm hoping that, once I get in the habit of making these posts, I'll have much clearer thoughts planned out. If I make it a habit, I'll start thinking over the course of the day what sort of things I want to include, what thoughts I want to present, etc. As such, I apologize in advance for the next like twenty of these fucking things. They're gonna read like ass, just like this one.

But that's okay. I'll improve.

- Salt