No updates yesterday because I was running the last session for my long running D&D campaign. We started in December of 2017, so It’s been a while.
Everybody seemed to enjoy the ending that I made, but I underestimated how finishing a campaign that long would make me feel. The longest continuous campaign I’d run before this was only about three months and that petered out instead of having an official ending. About five minutes after ending this one I have a serious head-rush that lasted for a few hours. In fact, I still feel pretty good, where as I usually feel sort of drained after a session.
Been slowly knocking about the house today, picking things up. Running D&D as an adult means basically running a dinner party so there’s a lot of clean up afterwards. I also have a lot of online accounts that I need to shut down. I’ve been a subscriber to roll20, which we used during the hight of the pandemic, and I was making maps over at Inkcarnate. Also I had a wiki of my campaign world over at World Anvil.
All of these services were great but a lot of them were more tool for me, so I’ll have to pull my data out and close down any paid subscriptions. That’s pretty much the tenor of the next few days: archiving the old campaign materials and thinking about the future.
Probably won’t be going with D&D for the next game. I found it to be a little restrictive for the way I like to run games right now. So I’m going to be looking at what else is out there, and most likely publishing my thoughts on here.
Just finished prepping for Dungeons and Dragons tomorrow. Been working on it for the last two days and it feels good to have it done. I’m not one of those DM’s that likes to go insane with prep. I just like to have what I need for when I’m at the table. (Knowing what that will be is the trick, you see.)
I am however, a little fried and trying to take the next few hours to relax. Which for the last week or two has meant working on this site – either by tweaking settings or writing posts. Was talking with my wife earlier and I came to realization that my sites are the equivalent to working on muscle cars in the front yard.
So if you ever need me, I’ll be out here tightening bolts and making sure the engine’s running. (Or, you know, trying to keep the fires out.)
Just beat Cyberpunk 2077. Been playing it off and on for the better part of this year. I’ve sort of been savoring it like a fine wine. As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m pretty big fan of the cyberpunk genera.
So now I have a that hangover that you only get after good novel or long TV show binge. At some point, I’m going to have to finish prepping for the last session of my D&D campaign, but I’ve sort of had enough of endings right now. Going to chill for a little bit and refresh.
So the words don’t always come easy. I’ve been looking at this blogging interface for longer than I want to admit. The day’s been pretty uneventful, but I’m not ready to break my posting streak quite yet. Probably going to play some video games and head off to bed.
Boston is still there in case anyone was wondering, but didn’t want to check themselves. I checked. I’m nice like that.
With errands officially run, there’s not much else for me to do today. I have to contact a few people and then I’m gong to tweak a few things on here.
Read the first Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells while on the train. I liked it more than I thought I would as it avoided almost every easy joke it could have made with it’s premise. The world building was tight and the characters were fully drawn and had that “I know people like this” quality that didn’t draw attention to itself. That’s not an easy thing to do. Especially with a main character that still needs to feel “non-human.”
There was one thing in the ending that I didn’t like, but the story telling itself might pull me into the next one. We’ll see how a feel in a few hours, but the smart money is on me reading them all.
So I thought I’d finally get to why I moved from a Jekyll install to a WordPress site for this blog. Settle in because this might get slightly technical.
First, WTF is Jekyll? And if you do know what that is, why would I be moving from it to WordPress when usually it’s the other way around?
Jekyll is a static site generator, which is a command like tool that takes template and text files and assembles them into website files (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). This methodology is part of a larger concept called JAMStack that’s basically moving away from backend processing for websites and sticking to simpler technologies that have been around since the birth of the web.
This site was hosted on GitHub Pages service of GitHub, which is a code hosting repository. And was a way for me to get this site up with almost no money. (I just had to pay for the URL.)
So why leave?
Because this wasn’t all of my setup. Jekyll is just the command that the processing at GitHub used to compile my site when another command line tool called Git told it to. Also, Jekyll doesn’t have an interface. This meant that if I wanted to add a new post, I would either have to write it as a text file and upload it to GitHub using Git, or find a third-part web app to act as an interface and CMS. I opted to for the latter and used the simple but quite nice CSM Siteleaf.
But this doesn’t control the layout, which meant that I had to use a templated theme that if it didn’t do what I wanted I had to edit the code myself. Even that required some doing because Jekyll is just flat script, so if I wanted to recode the theme to give myself a new feature I might have to install a plugin for the Jekyll so it could understand it.
This also came with it’s own challenges because GitHub doesn’t allow most Jekyll plugins with the basic GitHub Pages setup so I would have to create a new subsystem using GitHub Actions that would trigger on update to build my site with the configurations I wanted.
And If I wanted to do something crazy like add a sub title to a post, I might have to change the entire CMS layer because Siteleaf might not understand that functionality to add it to the interface even though I coded it into the theme directly.
This is all before we get into things like view counts and comments with both would require two separate third party apps that I would have to integrate.
You get the idea.
The real reasons I put myself through all this was as a personal challenge to make it all work cheaply and because my old blog was feeling stale and I wanted to start again with a slightly new concept. Something more immediate and a throw back to when personal blogs felt personal.
And that worked, by the way, for a long while. It felt great to pull all these parts together from scratch and will this site into existence. I learned so much working with JAMStack technologies, and there are a lot of people that believe that things like Jekyll sites are the future of the web and I largely believe them, even now.
If you’re a full on web developer and running a business that sets up digital storefronts for others, there’s really not a faster way to do that once you get your tooling down. And unfortunately, that’s what most of the web is turning into: store fronts and cash registers for businesses.
Why go back to WordPress?
In a world where I can go anywhere, why go back to WordPress? It’s getting a reputation in web dev circles as being a really bloated piece of software. Maybe that’s true, but I really love it and always have.
It does almost everything I want out of the box – generate the website and allow me to edit it within the same tool! – and what it doesn’t do straight away is handled by like one or two plugins.
While I was setting all of this up, I looked at my profile on WordPress.com and found that I joined in the end of 2006. That’s only one year less than WordPress.com has been around. I remember finding it and thinking, “a tool that lets you make a site with posts AND PAGES!!! For free?!!” Every web project that I’ve made since then has been either a hosted or self-hosted WordPress site. I read their update blogs when I’m not working on a site and get exited.
Their one of their a tech company that still holds my values of openness and inclusion. And by now I know the tool pretty damn well.
So I was the only person who was surprised when I finally went back to WordPress.
And they didn’t even make me feel bad about my time away.
There’s an old social convention comparing website work to construction. I can remember when people were in the process of updating their sites, they’d put up jaunty gifs of construction workers always with the phrase, “pardon our dust.”
I bring this up because I’m still tried from staying up late working on my website and now there’s actual construction work happening outside my window.
The irony is not lost on me.
I think the only logical thing to do would be to go for a walk. They can’t be doing this shit everywhere in town. Not that I can get everywhere in town. Moving slow today.
Okay, that’s a lie, but it’s better than saying “The user facing part of the refresh should be kind of done maybe.”
As stated earlier, I’ve moved this to WordPress from a Jekyll install on GitHub pages. Again, I’d love to do a run down of why I moved to WordPress from a JAMStack style site, but I still have a lot of backend stuff to do, so again, I’m going to put a pin in that.
Anyway, I wanted to whip off a quick “hey it works!” post. Now back to it for me.
One the themes of this blog has been the site refresh as the current Jekyll theme isn’t everything I want. I’ve been picking at this project off and on for months, and have reengaged in earnest a few days ago.
However, I’ve decided to rebuild the entire site as a self-hosted WordPress Blog for arcane reasons that I’ll go into in a later post.
Assuming, of course, I don’t brick the entire data repository and have to start over. (Which I can tell you won’t happen quickly as I stare at a wall for months trying to figure out where shit went wrong.)
So today I’m going for a walk to clear the head then it’s into the heavy lifting of importing all of this content into the test instance I have running on a Raspberry Pi.
