Tuesday, 9th January, 2024
I’ve been thinking about The New Blog💫. How is it going to work, what should it have on it, how will I make it etc. etc. It needs to be a static site. I have a wordpress site but that’s a secondary blog specific to amateur radio. Maybe one day I’ll fold it into the main site, perhaps when I get bored of radio blogging, and just want it as a subset of my main site. Right now it doesn’t cost me anything to keep it going, so I’ll just leave it. I really like this site, and want to keep what I like and build on it. I started this site 6th August 2021, 886 days ago. I did pop in and out of tiddlywiki a couple of times but always came back here and have been here solidly for quite a while now. There are a few annoying things, like creating a new file each day and entering the frontmatter. I’ve semi-automated that on 1Writer and VS Code, 1Writer is the most automated, but I wonder if it can still be improved. I’d like to bring in larger blog posts that are about a specific topic, vs. a paragraph about some daily ramblings, but I want the ease of writing daily ramblings to write more blog posts. The traditional way is just to use two collections or architypes of content. One for blog posts and one fror daily notes. The problem with this is all I’m doing is making two folders of files, and just writing in one or the other.
I suppose if I had more time, I’d write out drafts. write my daily whatevers, then rearrange them into blog posts and daily notes and do all the tags and frontmatter and pictures and it’ll just be that.
Things I’ve been thinking about for it:
- Keep using Jekyll. I can reuse what I learnt from this site, and I want to keep it simple
- Do I need search?
- Personally, I can just search in VS Code, and publically, maybe link to github search in the repo?
- there are some jekyll search plugins or javascript methods for it but I don’t like adding that. Plus I have to figure out how to format the results.
- There’s google search but meh.
- Who’s even searching anyway?
- Maybe add a random post like this guy
- People expect one page per blog post, one file, tags, etc. not a big wall of text with stuff in between.
- Relates to search as well.
- Wondering if I can just keep a manual list of these posts
- Does it matter what people expect?
- I can always keep another collection of “articles” or something, for when I do make a Blog post, plus as a way to archive the existing content should someone want it. My most visited page is my beancount setup from about 8 years ago!
- Wondering about a single text file for a month or even a year, and just separating things by headings. Then using custom header links to sort things out. Not sure about this, it makes some things easier and some things harder. Guess I should try and it on a test site and see what it’s like
- Using table of contents to generate menus maybe?
- I’d like it for me, to browse back through as I’m writing.
- Wondered about link lists
- Probably can use data or yaml in frontmatter or dedicated site data files…not quite sure how or what for yet.
I’ve also started playing this nerdy but cute and relaxing bee game. So I’m torn between playing the bee game 🐝 and tinkering with this new site idea. Although I’ve spent all evening writing this post and getting distracted with random blogs.
