Saturday, February 10, 2024

I bet people are thinking, "Geez, Jack, just pick a blog, man!" And I would, but I can't. Good morning! 👋

In any extended online pissing match, both sides end up being wrong. It's hard to watch.

There are many broken images in my blog archives. A lot of them had been embedded from SmugMug, which I no longer use. But many others are broken because I'm stupid and have migrated blogging tools a thousand times and they just get lost in the shuffle. So, two lessons: Dependencies are Bad, and Stop Changing Shit All the Time.

This blog takes about 20 seconds to fully render out of Tinderbox. That's not long, but it's too long, especially while I'm composing a post and want to see what it's going to look like 75 times before I publish it 😆. I tend to type->render->edit->re-render->repeat so saving a few seconds each time is worth the trouble.

It occurred to me after chatting with Dave Rogers yesterday that most of the content only needs publishing after global template updates. There are only a handful of documents that change with each post, e.g. the home page, the post itself, and the archives page.

I created a stamp that toggles the $HTMLDontExport and $HTMLExportChildren flags so that only relevant content is rendered when exporting. I have a container of aliases that list the outline items that don't need to be exported each time and I toggle those off during the draft phase. Then I toggle them on for a final export before pushing the changes live.

I could probably create some sort of fancy action code that would know what to do. Maybe I will, but for now this does what I need.

The export now takes under two seconds. (It's the /archives.html page that's the killer, so I wait until the last minute to render that one). Show me another blogging tool that makes something like this so easy.