Development
45 entries. 44,608 words.
2016-01
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Looking At Unity 5 and Unreal 4.
2016-01-23.
(I totally stole this image from depaul.edu.) One weekend I got the idea that it would be simple for me to write a hit video game, make tons of money, and leave my day job*. I’ve dabbled at writing games now and then since I first learned programming back in the 80s, so this is nothing new (I have yet to actually complete a game, though). Anyway, I started reading up on popular 3D game engines.
- Development
- Reviews
2019-03
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Google Stadia Announcement.
2019-03-20.
Google announced a new gaming “platform” curiously named Stadia. It’s a lot of things, but in simple terms I’d call it a cloud gaming service, similar to that OnLive service that died a horrible death some time ago. But it’s more than that.
On first glance, I’d say it has about as much chance of long-term success as OnLive did. It sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
- Consoles
- Development
- Musings
2019-07
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Blaugust 2019 OPML File.
2019-07-24.
Theoretically you can click the following link to download the latest version of an OPML file of Blaugustians:
Blaugust 2019 OPML File
I tend to model my software development life around the Perl mantra: “The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.” Thus did I find myself hemming and hawing over the prospect of manually adding a whole bunch of blogs to my RSS feed reader for this Blaugust.
- Development
2019-08
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Quest For The One Blog, Part 1.
2019-08-11.
Blaugust has inspired me to write a lot more, and to think about my blog, so I thought I would start writing an open-ended series of posts about a very long-term, often-neglected project of mine: Migrating to a new blogging platform. The generic "this is a post about blogging" image.
Over the years, I’ve made a bunch of web sites. I’ve been with a bunch of different web hosts. I currently have four different web sites that I “maintain” (with varying degrees of updates, from none to frequent): A real-name site, a writing site, a music site, and a gaming site.
- Development
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Quest for The One Blog, Part 2.
2019-08-11.
Previously, I mentioned that I planned to investigate the Pico and Grav blogging platforms first, since they are both PHP-based, database-less platforms that operate on Markdown flat files, which sounds like the perfect place to start for my mission goals.
Incidentally this is exactly the kind of post I wouldn't normally put on this blog.
First I’d like to mention that it’s really hard to find alternate blogging platforms. Any sort of Googling will get you information on: WordPress, Blogger, possibly SquareSpace, and maybe a mention about Medium.
- Development
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Quest for The One Blog, Part 3.
2019-08-12.
Last time, I setup Pico and Grav on a Linux server. Now that I have a working installation of both Pico and Grav, it occurs to me: Now what?
I haven’t tested their capabilities extensively, but of the two platforms, I would say that Grav probably has more features and more support. It’s closer to what a WordPress user might expect to see in a blog. It has plugins and themes and an administration panel.
- Development
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Quest for The One Blog, Part 4.
2019-08-13.
Last time, I brainstormed about content archives without accomplishing much. This time, however, I am diving straight into the deep end and trying to create content in Pico and Grav.
Okay, that’s overselling it a little bit.
But I have now tinkered a little bit with Pico and Grav to see what it can do straight out of the box.
I imagine my writing workflow is going to look something like this (as it has, more-or-less, for the past month): Write a blog post in a plain text editor on some other computer, possibly my iPad with an Apple wireless keyboard, which is my favorite keyboard to write on.
- Development
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Quest for The One Blog, Part 5.
2019-08-14.
Last time I looked at Pico and Grav. I was going to look at Kirby CMS this time, but I encountered two things that stopped me before I even downloaded it.
Kirby No-Go First, upon perusing the cookbooks, you have to setup the same kind of one-directory-per-blog-post structure in Kirby that I didn’t like in Grav. Just for the record, contrary to Kirby’s tagline, that is not “adapting to your content,” it is, in fact, “forcing a strict ruleset upon your content.
- Development
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Quest for The One Blog, Part 6.
2019-08-15.
This is a list of Blogging/CMS solutions I’ve looked into so far, which I gleaned from this site. These are just some of the different ways that people (by which I mean programmers) have desperately tried to break free of the WordPress Industrial Complex.
Automad. I didn’t care for the documentation, or lack thereof.
Baun. Installed, see below. Very promising directory structure of content similar to what I had envisioned. Baun is apparently a newer iteration of Pico.
- Development
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Quest for The One Blog, Part 7.
2019-08-27.
I stopped writing about my Quest for The One Blog for a very good reason: I gave up on it. What I want to do is essentially impossible unless I develop the blogging platform from scratch myself (or fork one of the open source projects). It’s within my skillset to do that, but I just don’t have the time or motivation or funds for it. (But hey, if anyone is interested in Kickstarting it, let me know!
- Development
2019-09
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Quest for The One Blog, Part 8.
2019-09-08.
My current thinking is that I should be looking into two distinct blogging platforms. One for the “live” blog, the most recent stuff, where people can theoretically interact and leave comments on a daily basis, and consume an RSS feed.
The second platform would be for the “archives:” Mainly static pages of older posts for reference, without much of any interactivity.
Regardless of how I proceed with the “live” blog, the idea of a “static site generator” for the older archives appeals to me, or one of the Markdown-based platforms I’ve previously mentioned.
- Development
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Hugo – Quest for The One Blog, Part 9.
2019-09-10.
This one’s about Hugo, the static site generator. I’ve seen references to it all over the place during this ongoing research project. (Also Jekyll.) It seems to be popular among programmers, for reasons that should become obvious as I describe it below.
A static site generator is a tool that takes a series of input files, usually plain text files, and turns them into a big directory of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files.
- Development
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Half-Hearted September Update.
2019-09-17.
I’m back in a “I don’t really have anything to say” blogging mood. I’ve played maybe, possibly, two hours of games in the last week. I played a little bit more of Max Payne 3, and I logged into World of Warcraft for about 20 minutes to check something.
I logged in to check that a wonderful discovery someone made in Classic is, in fact, right there in Retail as well.
- Development
- MMORPG
- Music
2020-09
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Twitter Digest Posts.
2020-09-17.
I’ve been mildly interested in setting up a system of gathering my tweets into digests and posting them on the blog periodically, maybe once a week. I just like the idea of keeping all of my writing in one convenient place, for myself if nothing else.
It seems like something that should be very easy to do, but of course, it’s 2020, and all of the computing world has moved into walled garden silos where you’re forced to adopt somebody else’s stockholder-approved idea of an ideal workflow.
- Development
2021-02
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Quest for the One Blog, Part 10.
2021-02-02.
For completeness, I present this brainstorming session about merging two other kinds of content streams in with blog content, an unfinished draft from somewhere during a Lost Time Period of 2020.
- Development
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Golang Part 1.
2021-02-20.
Recently I started learning Go, Google’s internally-developed language. It’s also known as “Golang,” because it turns out that “Go” is a terrible search term.
- Development
2021-03
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Starting A New Job.
2021-03-04.
I’m pleased to announce that on March 1st, I started a new software engineering job, working generally in the field of “IT infrastructure lifecycle management.” This is a pretty big, life-changing sort of job for me.
- Development
2021-04
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Hosting on Azure - Quest for the One Blog, Part 11.
2021-04-25.
Setting up Hugo, the static site generator, to build my blog with Microsoft Azure.
- Development
2021-08
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Todo List - Quest for the One Blog, Part 12.
2021-08-07.
Mainly so that I can remember this, here’s a list of the outstanding problems with the blog that need to be resolved someday.
- Development
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Status - Quest for the One Blog, Part 13.
2021-08-08.
A quick summary of the current status of the Quest for The One Blog.
- Development
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YouTube Data API.
2021-08-27.
YouTube’s API is a pain.
- Development
2021-09
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YouTube and Twitter APIs.
2021-09-02.
An automated YouTube upload script is now working. Hopefully.
- Development
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Feed Experiment [+audio].
2021-09-17.
I’m experimenting with an idea I’ve had for a while, and that idea is to attach audio files to blog posts.
- Development
2021-10
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Automating Blog Notification Tweets with Zapier.
2021-10-08.
Some time back I mentioned that I wanted/needed a service that would listen for updates to my RSS feed.
- Development
2021-11
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Comment Server - Quest For The One Blog, Part 14.
2021-11-25.
I may have setup a working Remark42 comment server?
- Development
2021-12
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Advent of Code 2021.
2021-12-14.
I’m working on this year’s Advent of Code programming puzzles, something that’s new to me.
- Development
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Advent of Code 2021, The Dark Side.
2021-12-26.
I got something out of Advent of Code 2021, but I didn’t like how it affected me.
- Development
2022-01
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Flipping The AWS Switch - Quest for the One Blog, Part 15.
2022-01-09.
Tonight I’m going to start “flipping the switch” to host the blog entirely in AWS.
- Development
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Books Yo.
2022-01-18.
Of course I’m writing a web app to manage my list of books to read. Doesn’t everyone?
- Development
2022-08
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Recent Blog Changes On AWS.
2022-08-07.
I’m already sick of my Blaugust project, so I’m writing something else. This is about Amazon Web Services and Nginx config files, mainstream topics everyone can enjoy.
- Development
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Blog Changes This Month.
2022-08-26.
Blaugust inspired me to make some much-needed technical changes to the blog this month, which I will now try to recall for posterity.
- Development
2022-11
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ActivityPub And Me, Part 1 of ?.
2022-11-18.
I’ve been on a learning rampage on the topic of the fediverse lately, and there’s plenty of material for writing blog posts.
- Development
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ActivityPub And Me, Part 2.
2022-11-28.
There’s a land rush of ActivityPub implementations going on right now, and I’m in it.
- Development
2022-12
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Almost Two Years of Static Blogging.
2022-12-01.
I thought I should evaluate how static blogging has been going after almost two years.
- Development
2023-08
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State of the Site.
2023-08-03.
How my static blog works, summer 2023 edition, with nifty diagrams.
- Development
2023-11
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The Sudden Urge To Rebuild The Site.
2023-11-16.
Brainstorming from back in May about new blog site ideas.
- Development
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Trying Commentbox.
2023-11-21.
Out of nowhere I decided to try a new comment hosting solution, and it was easy.
- Development
2024-08
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Trying New (To Me) Comment Systems.
2024-08-02.
Expanding the third-party comment systems to CommentBox, Emote, and GraphComment.
- Development
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A 2024 Static Site Status Report.
2024-08-05.
A summary of the state of the blog and the lost Next.js blog I never finished.
- Development
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I Don't Like String Constants.
2024-08-23.
I find string constants mildly irritating, except in very specific circumstances.
- Development
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Webrings? Really?.
2024-08-26.
After seeing a third serious post about webrings in recent days, I thought I’d say a few words about it.
- Development
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A New Comment System?.
2024-08-31.
Some thoughts on starting to write a new comment system.
- Development
2024-09
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DIY Comments - Step 1.
2024-09-07.
I finally started writing a comment system for my static blog.
- Development
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DIY Comments - Step 2.
2024-09-11.
Continuing with a comment system for my static blog… handling spam, saving and loading comments from a Dynamo table.
- Development
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DIY Comments - Step 3.
2024-09-14.
Continuing with a comment system for my static blog. The client side experience, with and without Javascript.
- Development