Blau's Blog

A furry blog covering various topics including gaming, Second Life, and misc tech.

Welcome to Blau's Blog 3.0

Date: []
Categories: [Site Updates]
Tags: [jekyll], [grav]

So soon after Blau's Blog 2.0? Yeah.

See, the thing about websites, or anything really, is that it's only useful if you actually use it. If it's not pleasant to use, you're not going to use it. That's kind of what I fell into with the Jekyll blog.

Here's what I was doing every time I wanted to make a post:

  1. Open the command line (or terminal in VSCode)
  2. Type in bundle exec jekyll draft "my new blog post"
  3. Wait for Jekyll Compose to do its thing
  4. Type in bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts so you can preview your draft
  5. Open up the Jekyll Compose-generated file in VSCode
  6. Write. Bonus: Want an image? Gotta go copy/paste the Liquid code to pull an image and fill out its caption and alt-text
  7. Once you're done writing: CTRL+C the jekyll serve to stop it, do bundle exec jekyll publish relative-path-to-blog-post.md
  8. Once that's done, do bundle exec jekyll serve and double check everything
  9. CTRL+C the jekyll serve and do bundle exec jekyll build
  10. cd _site and then neocities push . to push the updated site to neocities
  11. Use VSCode to commit changes and push to Github

Don't get me wrong - having my own little static site that I wrote myself was great. I'm still pretty proud of it! But I kept finding myself fighting to get myself to open it up and write things. But that is way too many god damn steps to make a blog post for me. Could I pare it down? Yeah. But the guts of what I had to do are the same. I even left out a few steps having to do with frontmatter, not even counting the jekyll-compose setup. (If you don't want to use jekyll-compose, your other option is copy-pasting your frontmatter & making sure you get the file name format correct every time you wanna make a new post. That plugin just automates it for you.)

edit: I forgot to add - I also can't update the Neocities site at all unless I'm at my desk, with my computer. Which, honestly, is where I am most of the day, but having the option to post from another location is a nice thing

Going through The Saga™ with finding a SSG/CMS/something for the Kinzart website - I'll talk about that in another post - meant I was looking for and trying out a bunch of other website maker options and I realized that I really missed using a regular tinymce-style blog post interface. My initial thought was to write one for Jekyll, as an exercise. A bit lofty, since I have pretty much zero experience in Ruby or anything like that, but, hey, figured it would be a good project to get me started. Put that aside once I did a little looking around and found that there already are quite a few visual editor options for Jekyll (and other SSG builders like Hugo). Got pretty excited about that - only to realize that they either required a decent chunk of extra setup, or were several years out of date and did not want to work properly unless I downgraded some of the dependency versions.

I had been meaning to give Grav another shot for a bit, as I'd tested it very briefly around a month ago with eyes on using it for the Kinzart website. It doesn't really fit the use case I need it for there, but here, on my personal blog? It's not too bad. The blog post addition process could be smoother, but for the most part, it does what I need it to do. I am hoping that the ease of access jump here is going to be more conducive to me getting on and making more posts - I've had so many drafts floating around in my head and nowhere to put them.

Grav does have some... quirks? Though, I can chalk most of them up to the fact that I'm not familiar with Twig yet and most of the things I'm trying to get it to do, I need a bit of that skill. For example, right now the Links page is just a collection of my personal links, my buttons, and a placeholder for the cool sites section. On Jekyll I had that set up with a liquid loop and some yaml, but I don't think I can do that here. I do believe there is a way to get to roughly the same output as I had going before once I get more familiar with how things work.

I need to finish tweaking the CSS with this theme sometime, mostly just little things that I'd like to adjust. Bless the Hypertext theme, it's so nice to work with. There's also some plugins I need to get up and running - comments would be handy, for one. But for now I'm just happy the site's live.

I'm going to leave the Neocities blog up, but put notices up on it that I'm going to be making this my primary blog spot instead of there. Here's hoping that this pays off and I start using this more often!

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