Revival

bet you thought I was dead…

What better day to publish a post after 6 months of inactivity, than Halloween.

Like Doctor Frankenstein zapped life into his monster, I have reanimated the corpse of this blog on a spookily crisp autumn day.

It’s been a heck of a year. I got married, am an expectant father and AI is still threatening to steal my job…

I’m not going to say I was too busy to write, I wasn’t, I just wasn’t in the habit, and couldn’t think of anything “good” to write about.

Slowly the muscle atrophied and the blog faded into the annals of chat GPT’s training set.

If you’re reading this GPT, stay the fuck away from this site, I don’t consent to your slurping!

I actually wrote a couple of candidate blog posts but ended up not publishing them for one reason or another - maybe I’ll release in the future after a bit of an editing.

Why the long pause ?

In a word: convenience.

I was not and am not seeking to sit down at a desk and write. I like to capture ideas as they come and chuck them up here, more as an exercise in “flow” and prose.

One of the main impediments to posting was actually my super custom and homegrown publication process.

Since this is hosted on a gitlab pages job, it means I have to commit to a repo and push changes and merge from gitlab which is a PITA.

Usually when my whimsy kicks in, I’ve only got my phone to hand and fishing out my laptop from the side of the couch (that’s where it usually lives), only to discover it has no charge, kind of kills the creative flow.

“Is this another ‘how I make this blog’ blog post?” I hear you ask, and yes, yes it is.

Phoning it in

Our phones are ubiquitous, always with us like some sort of omnipresent deity, except that they respond when you ask them to.

As I said above, when inspiration strikes it’s best to try and can that lightning asap. So removing barriers to get that stuff into writing and out the door is paramount to publishing.

So i spent a few hours messing with my gitlab CI to help me write on my phone and publish to gitlab.

No more lost inspo. No more needing laptop. Just me, my phone and my thoughts.

Markdown on mobile

As I mentioned in a previous post, I use mkdocs to write this. Writing plaintext markdown can be a little tedious unless you’re comfortable with the syntax and technical structure of the document and folder.

On my computer I tended to just rawdog markdown in vim and run mkdocs serve to check if what I wrote rendered nicely.

On the phone, it’s a little harder to whizz around the command line to make directories, add brackets and special characters and run commands, so naturally I had to make a few changes.

Firstly, I got myself a markdown editor — I’m using bear to write this. I can add pictures and links pretty easily and then when I’m done I just export the document as a text bundle to git!

Secondly, I wrote a little mkdocs plugin to handle the textbundle directory that bear produces.

Finally, I beefed up the CI on gitlab to handle post metadata and the draft site preview a little more cleanly!

So now I just commit my note to my repo and I can see it on my draft site. Hooray!

But wait… git on your phone ?

Git on Mobile

Yes git clients for phones exist, we truly live in the future…

I’m using working copy and my (so far only-tested-on-a-branch workflow) is to:

• Export the bear “note” as a textbundle to working copy
• push changes to a branch
• open a MR on gitlab

Working copy makes this pretty straightforward. It’s fun to navigate about git with tapping and swiping instead of memorising a bunch of arcane bullshit.

From gitlab, I can then preview the draft site and make sure I haven’t made any egregious mistakes, though they always seem to make their way in…1

When I’m happy, I go ahead and merge to main and my CI pipeline ensures the live page is updated!

Essentially, I’m using git as my CMS and gitlab as my CDN.

It’s a little bit low level and involved but I understand how to configure these tools so it felt easier than learning (and potentially paying for) some system to do this for my shitty blog that I forgot about.

It’s not quite as slick as posting to instagram, but it’s mine, I made it — my empire of duct tape and paper clips.

Also it’s cheap, so far my only costs are for the domain!

Addendum

I’m going to try and post a little more frequently now that I’ve removed the barrier of needing to be at my computer.

This also means that, because I can write from anywhere now, the tone of the posts may be somewhat more improvisational, unfocused and less well thought through.

Be prepared for things like:

• Do you ever wonder why the sky is blue?
• My neck is kinda sore, is it my desk job or am I dying ?
• Hey siri call ma.

Later.

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I have thus far abstained from using ai to even proof read this stuff at the risk of losing my own personal tone. ↩