Gitified

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The first sign in my workflow that things are starting to come together on a project is when I start getting nervous that the next change I make will break it. After all, it can’t really be thought of as “coming together” if there’s nothing to break yet, right?

So I always have a little celebration the first time I get worried enough to set up a git repo for the work in progress. And that milestone was reached today on this new web system. 🥳

In addition to gitifying the code, I also got the tags and projects split out into their own nav mechanisms and made some progress toward the visual style I’m aiming for: something informal, like a hand written journal, but still legible and tidy. That’s not a lot to report, but I like to celebrate the little steps too. :-)


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Cutting The Monster Into Pieces

Now that I’ve identified a useable hosting candidate, my final test of their service will be to roll out a full implementation of the websmith deployment scheme. But in contemplating how I’m going to do that, I’ve realized that I may not have broken the project into distinct repos properly. So I’m going to figure it out by explaining it to the rubber duck. (Meaning you. :-)

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Deployment Test

The plan is to deploy this site to a robust HTML-only server, which will keep costs down and security high, since there won’t be any programmatic interfaces on the site itself that can be hacked. My deployment engine of choice is simple: I’ll be using git push. But before I sign up for a hosting account and start pushing my brains out the door on an automated basis, I wanted to test that procedure on a smaller scale, here in the lab.

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Tricky Shadow

Creating that Jeff-to-Nikola translator wasn’t too bad, but I did run into a headache trying to figure out how to structure my shadow files to conform to what Nikola is looking for. I read somewhere that Nikola could be told to search through the content directories recursively and that it happily consumed metadata in YAML format, so that’s what I set up.