And back, kind of... for now

As if to demonstrate that cyberplankton is a rather slow substrate, the next post sure took its time, hm? But in the meantime, a bunch of code got cleaned up, other parts got worse... and on top of it all, a switch from Windows to Linux meant (and still means) not only relearning a handful of things, but rethinking pretty much everything I knew about handling computers. That alone should be material enough for a blog, but that is not even a focus here really, more a side effect!

That means realistically, first of all, that the About/Margins section sees its first update apart from the Inaccurate Site History, which is more inaccurate by now. The other realistic test is this very workflow here, which consists of getting a text written in Kate and then onto the server.

I suppose if you can read this, it was successful.

I had originally thought to be much further by now, and if I had just clicked some blog at some hoster, I would be just, well, posting. Or it'd result in the umpteenth blog site I left behind over the years. There's something different about having it all set up tidily in prearranged menus, the CMS ready to integrate your latest post; then there is the self-hosted mess, which is inevitably a bit more involved. So let's just say that getting back to where I was on Windows sure takes some time.

But it's fine, things come to happen when they happen, I suppose. In two days it's also Setsubun. Why not get the blog and all going about...now?

Now, getting the formatting right, that might be another problem, which we’ll figure out next. Considering my non-existent Windows workflow was something like trying to make an awful mess out of my formatting via OpenOffice or LibreOffice, then peeling the resulting html code out of the exported files, just to receive somewhat consistent formatting- pah, no more. Currently ReText does the preparation job just fine, it exports to html without any broken Libre interpretations of what HTML should look like. And since the blog entries are just tiny snippets of html, well, I don't even need the entirety of the resulting file.

I guess one of these days I'll want to also figure out how to script that whole shebang together in a conveyor belt manner: write plain text in whichever text editor I like best by then, export it all with well-preserved formatting into a prepared template of a blogpost. If all goes well, it'll even fill the date and other metadata automatically in... But those are all rather optional targets for now.

It sure comes down to the point I just made before, namely that this single blog post instantly has me more involved than it'd be the case on said generic hosts. Because then I'd be as so often before merely wondering what to at all write about and never post anything again. Let's see what this year brings.

Happy Setsubun! 🏮