I guess I fell off my horse for a few weeks or months there, but everything is just fine, I just failed to make the whole blogging thing into a successful habit, and that was also inevitable from the way i was absolutely going ham on the rabbit holes as you could probably tell if you're somehow reading/following the whole thing. Which if you are, I appreciate, but, would like to question if that might be the best use of your time.
Anyway I am back and I don't think I really emphasized the fact that this blog has been live on my page ever since 16.md or thereabouts, so it's been quite a while. Of course there are still a list of important big things from my original plan that are missing, so I am going to try to list them out again without carefully re-reading so that I can actually end up with a fresh take and not taint myself with unimportant tangential ideas that will spawn projects.
Yeah I slipped off the saddle for a bit, and like my friend Glenn reminded me a while back, we really do expect to have only 3 thousand or so (and possibly significantly fewer, remaining) weeks with which to get done everything we hope to ever accomplish in our lives. Losing a single digit number of weeks to being bogged down by whatever life throws in our way once in a while isn't a big issue but looking at it this way definitely helps us to appreciate that it is a drop in the bucket, it's quite a few drops actually, so it helps ingrain in us an appropriate level of urgency about what's truly important.
A lot of the realizations I had that I already described earlier on are still valid. There are things in my daily routine that I have been doing a poor job of. One thing that I can try to do is publicly promise myself to do certain things to better myself, with all of you (very much unquantified, at this stage) readers as witness. Anything really to get some skin in the game...
Top of mind right now for the blog engine are really just two things.
I expect that I will insert the date into the nav block that I already autogenerate for each page. There is nothing in any of this that should leadto rabbit holes!
I got close to onlining giscus before, but I think one of the things I ran into was faffing about whether I would make a repo for each site or not. I think I will do just that and rename my repo to targeting it to for this now. I believe I will be able to move this blog site to a different domain without much trouble and I do suspect that being able to keep the discussion topic names less cluttered and repetitive will help at least in a small way.
Actually I thought about it some more and the dilemma where I left off was in making a choice here:
There is no need to get stuck on a choice like this, because it isn't set in stone.
I can transition to explicitly opting pages into having comments at a later time. For now it will be fun to get comments
enabled everywhere without my need to manually enable it, so I will leave it on the pathname setting.
Sweet, Giscus is online and my test comment I made on here worked. This is really awesome.
Since I broke the seal on frontend javascript with this I think I'll throw in some basic analytics soon, but for the majority of text only posts they will all be rendered by script in CI (which I was planning to integrate into github actions but works too well locally on my dev machine to change...). I find that much more of a sane approach than SSR by statically deploying the content to S3 as part of a git hook (I am using pre-push. I do not know why post-push isn't a thing.)