Quest for the One Blog

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37 entries. 36,556 words.

August, 2019

  • Quest For The One Blog, Part 1. 2019-08-11 12:58 AM.
    • Development

    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. They all have different domain names. Only one of those actually gets any traffic, and that’s the gaming site (ie. this one). My real-name site used to get some traffic when I wrote about politics and stuff, but I haven’t written anything there in years. I’m quite sure my family thinks I’m dead. 1,491 words.
  • Quest for The One Blog, Part 2. 2019-08-11 3:45 PM.
    • Development

    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. Anything other than those platforms requires a great deal of digging. If you tailor your search to .NET solutions, you’ll invariably end up at DotNetNuke (gag), BlogEngine.NET, or Orchard (Microsoft’s thing). 1,569 words.
  • Quest for The One Blog, Part 3. 2019-08-12 5:31 PM.
    • Development

    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. It would probably be safer to go with that one. On the other hand, it looks bigger. 847 words.
  • Quest for The One Blog, Part 4. 2019-08-13 4:51 PM.
    • Development

    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. Going forward, let’s say the plain text files will end up on DropBox. Then I would copy the plain text file containing the blog post into the CMS directory structure either through PuTTY or some other upload method. 1,896 words.
  • Quest for The One Blog, Part 5. 2019-08-14 7:35 PM.
    • Development

    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.” 1,368 words.
  • Quest for The One Blog, Part 6. 2019-08-15 5:26 PM.
    • Development

    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. (As if this all wasn’t confusing enough.) 967 words.
  • Quest for The One Blog, Part 7. 2019-08-27 11:19 PM.
    • Development

    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!) 834 words.

September, 2019

  • Quest for The One Blog, Part 8. 2019-09-08 5:15 PM.
    • Development

    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. I keep reading that Hugo is excellent for this. But before I can even think of going down that or any other road, I need to know how much work is involved in exporting some sixteen years worth of blog posts to Markdown format. 1,251 words.
  • Hugo – Quest for The One Blog, Part 9. 2019-09-10 12:16 AM.
    • Development

    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. Those files can be uploaded directly to a web server which of course becomes a web site. It works a lot like a compiler, which turns source code into binaries. Thus the appeal to programmers. 1,673 words.

January, 2021

  • 2021 Begins. 2021-01-01 12:00 AM.
    • Administration

    I have rebuilt Endgame Viable as a static site, which means massive changes for me, the developer, and some changes for you, the reader. First, it probably looks completely different. Second, there are some things that you won’t be able to do on the new site, at least not initially: Search for posts. Update: The workaround is to type “your search term site:endgameviable.com” into Google. Comment on posts. For comments, I wired up a somewhat janky private Remark42 server. Like posts. Unfortunately those were the major sacrifices I had to make in order to jump to a static site. I know there’s at least a couple of people out there who still like to comment on blog posts, and I hate to take away that feature, but Progress Demands Sacrifice, as they say. (I’m sure somebody, somewhere says that.) For the time being, you can ping me on Twitter at @endgameviable, or yell at me in the Blaugust Discord. 289 words.

February, 2021

  • Quest for the One Blog, Part 10. 2021-02-02 6:00 PM.
    • Development

    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. 779 words.

April, 2021

August, 2021

November, 2021

January, 2022

August, 2022

  • Comment Administration. 2022-08-04 10:55 AM.
    • Blog
    • Administration

    This brief post serves two purposes. 278 words.
  • Recent Blog Changes On AWS. 2022-08-07 4:23 PM.
    • Development

    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. 823 words.
  • Blog Changes This Month. 2022-08-26 6:00 PM.
    • Development

    Blaugust inspired me to make some much-needed technical changes to the blog this month, which I will now try to recall for posterity. 417 words.

November, 2022

  • ActivityPub And Me, Part 1 of ?. 2022-11-18 1:25 PM.
    • Development

    I’ve been on a learning rampage on the topic of the fediverse lately, and there’s plenty of material for writing blog posts. 1,352 words.
  • ActivityPub And Me, Part 2. 2022-11-28 8:07 AM.
    • Development

    There’s a land rush of ActivityPub implementations going on right now, and I’m in it. 983 words.

December, 2022

August, 2023

  • State of the Site. 2023-08-03 8:15 AM.
    • Development

    How my static blog works, summer 2023 edition, with nifty diagrams. 1,550 words.

November, 2023

December, 2023

January, 2024

August, 2024