clone url: git://git.m455.casa/m455.casa
posts/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 |
| 9 | [/posts#old-archived-posts|i archived all of those posts], because they felt |
| 10 | too professional or formal for something that was supposed to be a personal |
| 11 | website. |
| 12 | |
| 13 | originally, i was going to just delete them from my website and back them up to |
| 14 | a directory on my computer, but then i realized that some friends reference |
| 15 | some of the stuff i wrote, so i figured i should keep them up. unfortunately, |
| 16 | my [https://git.m455.casa/lol/|new website generator] doesn't generate |
| 17 | `id`s for headings, so i can't create anchor links without writing plain HTML. |
| 18 | this meant that all of the anchor links in my old blog posts were broken, which |
| 19 | was another reason i wanted to delete all of the old ones, because i don't have |
| 20 | the energy to update them all, and it wouldn't make my website fun to maintain |
| 21 | anymore. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | i also wanted to simplify the css a bit, to kind of match my new approach to |
| 24 | blogging, so getting rid of old tables, images, and random block elements was |
| 25 | nice, because that meant that i could get rid of the css rules i had to write |
| 26 | for them. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | after spending some time, thinking about how to keep old blog posts without |
| 29 | breaking them, while allowing me to use new css rules, i decided that i would |
| 30 | regenerate all of my old blog posts with my old website generator, which used |
| 31 | pandoc under the hood. this meant that all headings would get an `id` |
| 32 | attribute, and all of my old instructional blog posts wouldn't be broken |
| 33 | anymore. after generating static html files of the posts, i just copied all of |
| 34 | them into my `assets/` directory in my homepage source, which just gets copied |
| 35 | over to my build directory as-is. |
| 36 | |
| 37 | another thing i did was edit the code for my old website generator, so pandoc |
| 38 | created inline css for each of the old blog posts, so i didn't have to have an |
| 39 | extra `style.css` file in the `archive` directory, but also so i don't try to |
| 40 | touch or alter them later on, because i know i'll get the urge to edit some of |
| 41 | the older technical writing-adjacent posts, and because it would be too tedious |
| 42 | to edit each page's inline css. |
| 43 | |
| 44 | regarding my new approach to my homepage, i think the fact that heading `id`s |
| 45 | aren't generated is a good thing for me, because i enjoy writing unstructured |
| 46 | posts like this, and not having the ability to link to headings means less of |
| 47 | an urge to create instructions, which i want to save for my programming |
| 48 | projects or work portfolio. |
| 49 | |
| 50 | i guess john gruber's original intention was to write a blogging language, not |
| 51 | a technical documentation language, so by using something that renders so |
| 52 | similarly to the original markdown parser, i guess it only makes sense that |
| 53 | it's enabled my desire to write unstructured blog posts? |
| 54 | |
| 55 | maybe i just like writing paragraph after paragraph because it's not something |
| 56 | i can do as a technical writer in my day job. maybe it's just because i like |
| 57 | writing my thoughts out without any particular goal. i guess i also hope to |
| 58 | turn this into some kind of journal or diary too. |