Blogging with VS Code
I was always afraid to take the static site generator route because of my previous inability to use SSH from work. This is not such an issue now that we're remote. Plus there's always a phone with an SSH client if all else fails.
Having gone into the office a couple of times last week it really hits home how different life is without the expectation of commuting on a regular basis. Quite a few inconveniences pop up that my at-home schedule has eliminated. There's still a place for office work, though. I don't... miss it miss it, but I definitely appreciate elements of what it can bring to the day and the overall working experience.
I've been wanting to establish a creative writing outlet, and I'm wondering if the blog may be a means to do that. Not sure if that all fits together, but it might! I want to get into the writing process on a regular basis. Not so much to write a novel or anything that ambitious, but to hone my voice and stoke creativity. Obviously various electronics projects are creative outlets as well, but there is something special about the written word.
It stuns me that this is my 1,605th blog post if I believe the file count in this folder. I'm not sure I do, and I'm even less sure that all of those posts remain intact after the transitions from Blogger to TextPattern to Efendi to Ghost and now to Eleventy, but hey, close enough, huh?
The import/conversion process was really something. YAML is one of those things that's a great idea until it isn't, but unlike many such things the great/isn't line is really close to very simple use cases. Like, how do you deal with colons? And then you quote, but then you have to escape the quotes. Kind of feels like a cartoon mallet whack-a-mole, especially with various inconsistencies in the source material.
It's becoming more and more clear as the years roll on that it's super important to own and control one's data. It's one thing to avoid Blogger or Facebook or Medium or whatever du jour service is out there, but having your data inside a braindead system, jammed into MySQL or something in some inscrutable format, is almost as bad. Who cares who owns the spinning disk if you can't read it anyway? I like seeing all these text files and watching the SSG ingest them one-by-one fresh each time. I could ninja-edit one of those ranty undergraduate Blogger posts and up it pops on the site. But it's still text files. Stuff I can zip and put on five different drives.
Speaking of different drives, this winter I worked up a backup regime that finally makes me feel I've properly covered my ass. Cloud-syncs, on-prem cold storage, hot storage, warm storage. All temperatures of storage. That weird dualistic feeling of "this is crazy and I am crazy and this is so overdone" and "how is the rest of the world sleeping at night without doing this?" Own and control!
Back to braindead systems, even doing things with Docker images where I couldn't really be bothered what's going on because I can clean-sweep it with a one-liner, I see an app that needs a companion MongoDB container and I nope right out. I don't trust Docker, either. It's like the whole Star Trek transporter thing. Like, if you were there and now you're here but with different matter, isn't the there-you dead? Like, you killed the there-you and replaced it with here-you? Every time I see a container nuke itself and recreate I'm thinking, "Well, that's that. Everything is gone." And then up it pops again intact.
Is the techno-skepticism we often observe setting in with older age actually just a lack of trust? Like, we've been wounded before and it just isn't worth the faith anymore? All of a sudden we're cooking over open fires and growing our own radishes. Paleo-self-hosting.
It's only magic if you don't trust it. Is that true? The magic is your trust in the non-magical thing, or the thing is magic because it functions in spite of your lack of trust.
The NixOS people seem to have really figured out the radish-growing. Demanding a system that can reconstitute itself from primordial protein pools upon boot may be a little more than I need for my own confidence. I mainly want to maintain the feeling that a server or PC could get nuked at noon and it would be up and running with no data loss by bedtime. It's a noble mission, though. Having a text file that describes your whole computing environment is charming. Text files!