website things
Lately been back to playing with the website a bit. I’ve wanted to try out some css changes so luckily I can run the local development server first that lets me see how things will look. If I add some functionality it helps find issues. One of the things I want to add are notes. I think of them as shorter little things. Maybe little life things or an idea. Something I read somewhere. This will take a few little liquid things and I also want the notes to have an rss feed separate from the site so I will go read about how the 11ty rss plugin works and how to have two feeds. An alternative is combining them. Haven’t decided which way yet.
I know the basic mechanics of adding a collection type and other configurations and what I’ll need to do. What always happens is I spend a little time on how I want things. Get the new notes collection working. Basic things which just teach me more about how 11ty works. That has to be the fun and challenging part. The writing of notes or short little snippets takes really nothing.
At one point I had decided to pretty much use something else. I am always taken with Pika. What this whole thing has taught though is it is very worthwhile for me to learn things and try to make my site do a thing. Adding that functionality with tags or something is probably easy on pika. I guess I don’t want easy. What I want is learning.
One day I sat for hours on making a few things work I really wanted. In the end I got it how I wanted. The howto I found was a great kickstart to the process but I knew what I wanted. The most enjoyment ever was seeing it hosted on vercel. Then I figured out why rss wasn’t right. Thanks to Pablo for letting me know! I had to change how rss was done in the config. I will have to tell the howto maintainer some of the things I’ve found which vary slightly from his write up.
It’s all learning
So really what it comes to is never stopping. The Frankenstein website never finishes morphing into yet something else. Things I think off like adding wikilink support or looking at how I could do micropub or webmentions. So many things I could do. Maybe want to do. I don’t know how I would get the same level of appreciation and challenge on a blogging service. It seems sometimes like the real things aren’t up to me. They belong to the platform provider. So instead right now I play.
Moving the site later is never out of the question. What I want now are the other questions. The things that take me an afternoon sometimes to play with. To make work. To learn just a little more.
I don’t know that a pagecord or pika give that. What I do realize is at some time I will want that ease. Maybe I will grow tired of the little GitHub and vercel things. Want to hit publish and iA Writer sends the post to the micropub endpoint. And it’s a done deal.
I’m not there yet. I’m still playing with the things. And digging the hell out of it. I’ll be back when it really is October 16 here. Finish by finding a few more things to say. It will be coffee out then. Some reading and then back to my trusty MacBook for the terminal and an editor and a local development server. Yay! See you tomorrow.
It’s tomorrow already
And we call it today. I had good intentions of a nice walk this morning. Beautiful warm day and then I got to Coffee Bean. This is a regular thing for me. Come here maybe few times a week. Very easy to reach from home.
Going to read how the 11ty rss plugin works and then decide to do my little notes thing I want to play with next. I was listening to this person that moved here, took a room sight unseen. Found out just how bad it could be in Phnom Penh. Really people! Don’t do those things for a long term place. Anywhere. I moved in Hanoi after sometime because the room was not what I wanted. I just found what ended up my home for years with a wonderful landlady that became a friend. It all can happen easily. Other people do things differently. There is no real right way anywhere in Southeast Asia. There is doing it. Then finding the wrong and right. Then learning yet another lesson.
That’s today though. That’s my little bit of writing for a Friday.
☕️ 4 min read