Blau's Blog

What's up? Patch notes and chatter

Date: [29th Sep 2024]
Categories: [Site Updates], [Blau Chatter]

The way that this blog setup is ... well, set up, feels like it lends itself more to Effortposting rather than regular small casual updates. It doesn't need to be that, but that's what my brain feels like it needs to be. It's probably because everything needs to have a title, and there are a lot of things that I'd like to post that don't really need a title. I'm trying to figure out how I can convince my brain that posting chatter and whatnot is OK here, so I'm trying this out: a dedicated category for these kinds of posts.

Back on Cohost I'd probably tag these as "blau chatter". So, I'm going to make that a category here. (While writing, I had the category named "What's up?"; I do still kind of like that category, and might swap to that at some point. We'll see.)

Anyway! I made some adjustments to the site and wanted to give a little "what am I up to" update.

Site Patch Notes (sorta)

Some lovely folks pointed out that my RSS feed reader isn't auto-detecting a feed available on the website because I forgot to add the appropriate info to the site's head - specifically this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Blau's Blog RSS Feed" href="/feed.xml"/>

Adding that should have fixed it. The RSS button on the sidebar is staying put, though I may change it into an RSS icon button at some point rather than a full menu entry. (That menu needs tweaked a bit anyway. I feel like the buttons are way too big.)

I've also learned how to nest CSS and went ahead and tweaked my site's CSS to be nested. Since I use a preprocessor (SCSS) that pops the nesting apart once the site is generated through Jekyll, this isn't immediately visible on the site's CSS, but it makes it much more readable for me editinng the source. The preprocessor popping everything out like that also helps sidestep an issue with certain older / LTS browsers where they can't properly display nested CSS yet. I do have one more chunk to do, but I need to figure out how exactly to do it because it's gonna involve some weird logic - I have rules for pre, code, pre code, pre, and code to alter how inline and standalone code blocks look, and it's not pretty to look at, but I'm not sure how to nest them quite yet. I'll figure it out though. Relatedly, adding the standalone code block up there reminded me that I don't seem to have syntax colors set up yet - it's marked as an html code block and should be highlighting parts of the code in different colors, but it's not. That's going on the to-do list.

Tangentially, nesting is also helping me figure out how exactly to do the little info / warning / etc boxes I'd like to have, especially for writing guides and whatnot. I've seen other Jekyll themes do them (and I know it's something built in to Github Pages), but I want to see if I can figure it out for myself rather than just referencing their code directly. I also realize that in the "Welcome to Blau's Blog 2.0" post I mentioned having a temporary version of this as the content warning boxes, but none of my published posts have content warnings, so you can't see that anyway. That was silly. But, it's there - those content warning boxes are hard coded into the template rather than more modular like I'd like though, but they're a start.

Speaking of those templates, this isn't something user-facing, but more for my own sanity: I have the post list generating template copied three separate times through the site (index, category archive, tag archive). I do not like this. It means I have to manually populate changes through the three things. I'm going to pop this out into an include at some point soon to make this a lot easier on myself.

I'll be adding a Links page in the near future with a wall of buttons and text-links to other websites and blogs. I'm going to see if I can leverage Liquid to make a template for generating the page; if it works out I'll share what I put together so other folks using Jekyll (or something similar that also uses Liquid) can do the same. I'll also be putting together an 88x31 button for myself that you can use to add me to your links page if you want.

As for upcoming (effort)posts, I have a few new drafts, but working on them has been pretty slow for reasons I'll get into in the next section. Two in particular are a continuation of the long-ass fursona species post that I wrote something close to a decade ago, and a guide on how to wrangle not-great light color shading in Substance Painter, mostly aimed at working with VRChat avatar kits (I didn't forget, I promise!). There's also the Intro to Mastodon / Federation info post that I wanted to get done before Cohost shuttered but I don't think I'm going to be able to get that one out in time.

So what's Blau been doing?

Right now, not a lot! The weather up here has been cloudy and rainy for close to two weeks now and my iron-deficiency anemia¹ has kicked up as a result of the cooler weather, so for most days I've been a pumpkin at best. Most of my time has been spent trying not to sleep the entire day away, no matter how badly I want to, which just means I end up sitting at the computer, half asleep, brain fogged to hell and back, not doing much of anything except listening to the same few Youtube videos over and over and autopiloting my way through farming for mission drops in Warframe.

Unrelated to this site - I'm considering swapping over another website I'm working on (that currently uses Wordpress) to use Grav instead, for a number of reasons, including the big dude behind Wordpress being a clown², and also, more practically, Wordpress does not run very well on NFSN (especially if your website does not get much traffic) due to how they manage their server uptime to reduce costs. Which, the latter is fine, it makes logical sense, not cross about that, it's just annoying to wait for Wordpress to finish doing a real big think to navigate wp-admin, lol. As far as I can tell, Grav runs more light and should be more responsive. If so, that'd be great. I'm going to spin up a test server over there to play with Grav and see how it works, and if it convinces me, I'll see about initiating a swap. No ETA on that, given the above, but, hey, it's on my to-do list. Not thrilled about the prospect of rewriting that site again (first time was from Jekyll to Wordpress for easier multi-user support), but you do what you gotta.

My brain did get a pretty good itch to adjust my fursona again recently. It's been rumbling around in there for a while but I didn't really know which direction it wanted to go. I ended up bringing back the catsona, though as a cat-dragon. I wasn't able to pull the design off last year or so when I shimmied my species around this last time, but I was able to get it to work this time.

Being primarily a cat vibes more with me than being primarily a dragon. I do like a lot of the dragon features I'd played with on dragon Blau though, so I'm keeping a few - namely the wings, some (smaller) horns, and probably the more dragonlike tail. This feels overall more comfortable. I'll have to update my anthro cat ref sheet from last year (drawn by my buddy PenumbralBeast) with her newer design points sometime soon. I also need to find another icon template to color in - I really dig the pride goo one I have now from TheNeonWolfyy, and I'm very used to seeing it around, so I want to find something else that clicks just as well, at least until I can get an icon commissioned.

This is also the thing that reminded me that I have to do the long-ass species post continuation. I had wanted to do it on Cohost, but never got around to it. Then I wanted to do it on the old iteration of my site, as its own page, but again never got around to it (and it would have been better as a post anyway). The original is from July of 2012(!), so over ten years has passed since then - got a bunch to add!

Blau's species has never really been stable. Being a cat in some form has been the most stable aspect about her across all iterations, and even that isn't a constant. Looking back at the old versions of her (and the other primary fursonas I've used) is a fun window back into my mind at the time, where I was and how I was thinking. It'd be cool to be able to share that here.