git.m455.casa

m455.casa

clone url: git://git.m455.casa/m455.casa

markup/posts/2022/starting-fresh.txt

1 title: starting fresh and archiving old blog posts
2
3 2022-09-21 00:06
4
5 okay, so this post marks the start of a wonderful informal blog about my
6 thoughts, feelings, and programming adventures.
7
8 i already had a blog with posts, but [/archive|i archived all of those posts],
9 because they felt too professional or formal for something that was supposed to
10 be a personal website.
11
12 originally, i was going to just delete them from my website and back them up to
13 a directory on my computer, but then i realized that some friends reference
14 some of the stuff i wrote, so i figured i should keep them up. unfortunately,
15 my [https://git.m455.casa/lol/|new website generator] doesn't generate
16 `id`s for headings, so i can't create anchor links without writing plain HTML.
17 this meant that all of the anchor links in my old blog posts were broken, which
18 was another reason i wanted to delete all of the old ones, because i don't have
19 the energy to update them all, and it wouldn't make my website fun to maintain
20 anymore.
21
22 i also wanted to simplify the css a bit, to kind of match my new approach to
23 blogging, so getting rid of old tables, images, and random block elements was
24 nice, because that meant that i could get rid of the css rules i had to write
25 for them.
26
27 after spending some time, thinking about how to keep old blog posts without
28 breaking them, while allowing me to use new css rules, i decided that i would
29 regenerate all of my old blog posts with my old website generator, which used
30 pandoc under the hood. this meant that all headings would get an `id`
31 attribute, and all of my old instructional blog posts wouldn't be broken
32 anymore. after generating static html files of the posts, i just copied all of
33 them into my `assets/` directory in my homepage source, which just gets copied
34 over to my build directory as-is.
35
36 another thing i did was edit the code for my old website generator, so pandoc
37 created inline css for each of the old blog posts, so i didn't have to have an
38 extra `style.css` file in the `archive` directory, but also so i don't try to
39 touch or alter them later on, because i know i'll get the urge to edit some of
40 the older technical writing-adjacent posts, and because it would be too tedious
41 to edit each page's inline css.
42
43 regarding my new approach to my homepage, i think the fact that heading `id`s
44 aren't generated is a good thing for me, because i enjoy writing unstructured
45 posts like this, and not having the ability to link to headings means less of
46 an urge to create instructions, which i want to save for my programming
47 projects or work portfolio.
48
49 i guess john gruber's original intention was to write a blogging language, not
50 a technical documentation language, so by using something that renders so
51 similarly to the original markdown parser, i guess it only makes sense that
52 it's enabled my desire to write unstructured blog posts?
53
54 maybe i just like writing paragraph after paragraph because it's not something
55 i can do as a technical writer in my day job. maybe it's just because i like
56 writing my thoughts out without any particular goal. i guess i also hope to
57 turn this into some kind of journal or diary too.