it's pudding time!

Currently reading: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚

Off to a good start!

Just had one of those unburdening moments as I sat fretting about permalinks & realized I should apply CJ Chilvers' dictum about photography just as readily to writing:

“Few people are really ‘following’ your work. Even fewer care. What are you doing with that freedom?”

Lunch Walk, 2023-01-31
Alberta St.
Portland, OR

Wheat paste of Disney’s Robin Hood taking aim with an arrow under Old English script that reads “Tax the Rich”

A nativity scene, with Joseph and Mary repainted with Black Metal face paint.

Wheatpaste of a tv mounted on a human body giving a thumbs up. The TV reads “Profit from the Panic”

Faded, tattered wheapaste that reads “Say His Name // Daunte Wright"g

#alberta #portland #pdx #StreetArt #photography #fujifilm 

Updated my Hugo poster to includes time and tz offset:

<paste.lol/mph/hpost…>

If you’re using omg.lol’s git workflow, this version ought to work:

<paste.lol/mph/omgpo…>

Don’t forget to tweak line 15.

#hugo #ruby #omglol #blogging 

Very quick little Hugo posting script that lets you set title, tags and category, then makes a slugified file name and opens the file (using macOS open not your shell editor).

https://paste.lol/mph/hpost.rb

It does not check for the file already existing yet, so don’t name something the same thing on the same day: It will clobber your existing file.

#hugo #ruby 

A screenshot showing a picture with hashtags underneath. A Mastodon icon leads the line of hashtags.

I updated my tags shortcode to include a little Mastodon icon at the front of the line since the links are taking you offsite and to another service.

paste.lol/mph/tags….

#hashtags #microblog #hugo #shortcodes #mastodon 

Mist and clouds partially obscure mountains and hills over a rocky beach. Someone in a bright red jacket is small against the landscape.

#SilentSunday #OregonCoast #manzanita #pnw #photography 

Screenshot of a web browser showing a page with image thumbnails and text areas with YAML and Markdown snippets

I’ve got a test instance of my new Hugo site running on Cloudflare.

I built an “image of the week” feature for it that uses site params and a partial to populate a slot on the front page of the site. I can fill in a few lines of YAML and it goes from there, pulling the image and metadata from SmugMug.

It was sort of clunky gathering the URLs and other information for it out of SmugMug, which does a lot to obfuscate URLs. So I extended imgup to add a YAML snippet on the recents page to copy and paste into config.yml in the Hugo repo.

It doesn’t look, btw, like micro.blog will work for my main site. I’d like a little more control and flexibility, which I can get with bare Hugo. I put the work I’ve done on my Hugo theme up on my test micro.blog instance and realized what it would take to get it all working, and how the feedback loops are pretty slow.

So the question now is “what belongs in my core site and what belongs on micro.blog?”

Screenshot of a web page showing thumbnails and snippets of Markdown to post images.

imgup kept getting slower and slower, then I realized “oh, it’s returning the whole upload album” and fixed that. I haven’t built a thing I use and enjoy every day in a long time. I use imgup pretty much every day. It makes photo posting much easier.

#smugmug #imgup #photography #sinatra #ruby 

The other thing I’m debating is how much old content to bring in. I have 18 years of posts from 2002 onward. I feel resistant to burying things, even if I got them wrong at the time. You can’t model growth & change if you can’t show growth & change.

A screenshot of a web page notifying the reader that a post is more than 2000 days old

I’m close to switching from a heavy Jekyll site to something lighter on Hugo. SimpleCSS is nice to build up from. Still debating hosting: micro.blog’s exports are solid. The cost is a bit of flexibility. The benefit is better posting tools.

Screenshot of a web page using the SimpleCSS framework.

Saturday Coffee Walk, 2023-01-28 (Exteriors)
Foster Road
Portland, OR

Bright yellow building with a yellow-on-black sign that reads &ldquo;Starday.&quot;

Brick building with a bright yellow sign with red lettering that reads &ldquo;Market.&quot;

a white and yellow garage with a garage door that has a red and green squares pattern

An old building with neon signage that reads Mt. Scott Fuel Co. inside a cartoon-like log.

#FosterRoad #portland #pdx #photography #fujifilm 

Saturday Coffee Walk, 2023-01-28 (That Fence Edition)
Mt. Scott/Arleta
Portland, OR

Two cats carved of wood sit on a wooden fence

A white plastic armadillo sits on a wooden fence

A wooden cat and wooden toad sit on a wooden fence.

#portland #pdx #MtScottArleta #photography #fujifilm  

Saturday Coffee Walk, 2023-01-28 (Little Things) Mt. Scott/Arleta, Foster Road
Portland, OR

A pink, plastic toy castle sits among weeds and winter growth.

A silver Mack Truck bulldog sits on a blue truck hood.

Ivy pokes out of the crack in a fence painted with faded pink paint,

A sticker showing a masked person holding a molotov cocktail reads &ldquo;It&rsquo;s going down!&rdquo; g

#portland #pdx #MtScottArleta #photography #fujifilm 

Columbia River Gorge at Dusk, 2023-01-27
Corbett, OR

The light gave out and there’s a lot of grain, but I’m keeping them.

A long shot down the Columbia River Gorge from a high vantage point. A building sits on a high cliff overlooking the river.

Trees reflect on the smooth water of the Columbia at dusk

Trees reflect on the smooth water of the Columbia at dusk

A long shot down the Columbia River Gorge from a high vantage point. A building sits on a high cliff overlooking the river.

#ColumbiaRiverGorge #photography #PNW #fujifilm 

Mt. Hood from Horse Thief Butte, 2023-01-26
Columbia River Gorge
Washington

Mt. Hood in the distance over dark scrub

Mt. Hood under dark skies and an orange sunset sky. A river in the dusk in the foreground.

Mt. Hood seen in the far distance under cloudy skies, between two rock walls.

Mt. Hood in the distance, low light over a river and desert flowers.

Horse Thief Butte, 2023-01-26
Columbia River Gorge
Washington

The light was tricky and hard, so at one point I just started paying attention to the tenacious little plants growing among (and on) the rocks.

Scrubby plants grow out of the rock. Blue and gray sky in the background.

A red and green plant grows on gray, lichen-speckled rock.

A red plant with tiny white button buds.

Tiny fern grows out of lichen-speckled rocks.

#ColumbiaRiverGorge #HorseThiefButte #plants #desert #photography #Washington #PNW #fujifilm 

Drive Down the Gorge, 2023-01-26 Columbia River Gorge
Washington

Second of several. Horse Thief Butte is a pretty amazing place to clamor around, right where the terrain around the Gorge turns to desert.

Reddish brown rocks under a cloudy blue sky. Brown and yellow desert scrub on the ground.

A craggy butte of orange-brown rock looks out over the Columbia River. Gentle desert hills in the background.

Mt. Hood can be seen in the far distance between two craggy walls of rock in the foreground.

A craggy butte of orange-brown rock rises over the plain.

#ColumbiaRiverGorge #HorseThiefButte #photography #Washington #PNW #fujifilm 

Drive Down the Gorge, 2023-01-26
Columbia River Gorge
Washington

One of several tk. Took a drive down the gorge on the Washington side with my friend Luke. The sun and clouds were pretty disruptive and fickle. Still had fun.

A pair of blue and pink plastic crosses are at the center of a roadside shrine. A tall bridge is in the bacground.

A steel bridge pokes up out of the pines in front of mist-covered mountains

Mist and clouds lay low over the hills on the gorge.

Red and white high tension wire towers against a misty mountain on the river.

#ColumbiaRiverGorge #BridgeOfTheGods #photography #Washington #PNW #fujifilm 

omg it's a weekly update (2023-01-27)

Week of 2023-01-22

📷 Photography

The highlight of the week was for sure a trip down the Columbia River Gorge on the Washington side with my friend Luke. The weather was fickle, the light was all over the place, and I went home thinking "I'm not going to like what I got much," but I ended up pretty happy with a selection. I made a few posts:

Current favorite:

Trees reflect on the smooth water of the Columbia at dusk

✏️ Writing

My job coach says I need to write and post stuff on LinkedIn, so I've started working on stuff I feel like I could share there. It is daunting. I don't want to but take her point.

So, this week I just set the very modest goal of "get started."

That entailed several pomodoros worth of ... something? It wasn't great, and not to my standard, but it was a start and I could see things I might salvage.

It's sort of interesting, having not sat down for a while to write about anything that was not occurring to me in the exact moment, or without a very, very clear and immediate business need, to start writing and realize that once I did a couple of pomodoros and could sit back and review, my mindset was much more akin to when I'm doing post in photography. It felt healthy: "Well, that's not quite right and the whole thing is not a keeper as is, but here's what you could do with it, and here's what you learned about that kind of thing."

Gonna keep at it.

📚 Reading

I didn't read much. I do have a book about Swift programming I can't wait to dig into next week during learning time. I just got pinged that a few of my reserves from the library are available all at once, so I've got some science fiction to choose from.

⚙️ Organization

I learned that kanban boards in Obsidian can have their own settings, so I did something for my mental health with it:

I started my job search in earnest at the beginning of the month. I have a practice of spending Monday, Wednesday, and Friday reviewing job listings; Tuesday and Thursday go to applying (cover letters, etc.)

I started a kanban board in November where I noted postings. I have columns for:

  • Interesting, needs research
  • Ready to apply
  • Applied
  • In progress
  • Dropped/Declined

On one not great day I got a decline in the mail. I made a little note in the card note and moved it into the "Declined" column with a few others. Because all I could see was the cards, not the notes, it just looked like a wall of rejection. Then I looked over at all the "Applied" cards and realized I didn't know when I'd applied or how long they'd all been sitting there.

I realized two things from that one minute:

  • If I don't have some way of seeing why jobs are in a dropped or declined state, on bad days I'm gonna turn that into a negative story.
  • If I don't know how long I've had things I've applied for sitting there, I'm at risk of overestimating how much or how little I've been doing on my search.

So I added metadata to my card notes:

  • Date found
  • Date applied
  • Date dropped
  • Reason

Some of that metadata shows up in the cards on the board, not just in the related notes. It helps to see it. Especially because, given the current macro economic situation, I'm seeing a number of roles get pulled within days of being posted, so I note that in the "reason" and it's right there on the card when I review the Closed column. It's good to see some of it is not just me.

I changed up my daily todos and journaling, too. My daily task list doesn't have a "work" and "personal" distinction any longer. There's just a list of three things I need to get done each day. Job hunting related stuff isn't even a thing to accomplish now, it's just a few pomodoros each day given over either to looking for listings or applying.

🫥 How are you feeling?

Pretty good!

This was an amazingly social week by my standards:

  • Monday lunch with one of the folks who used to be on my tech writing team, and a really nice conversation about photography.
  • Tuesday lunch with one of the folks who used to manage my tech writing team.
  • Wednesday afternoon was spent volunteering to help clean up part of the Springwater trail for a few hours. I walked around with a grabber collecting trash from encampments that had just been cleared. I am happy to discuss the experience in person but won't get into it here.
  • Thursday was spent traveling up the Columbia River Gorge with Luke (see above under photography).
  • Today I had coffee with one dear friend and lunch with another.

That is much more social activity than I normally do in a given week. I really liked it. All great people and nice conversations. I think two a week might be my natural pace, at least during the winter.

And generally, socializing aside, I feel pretty good.

I'm chasing down a potential contracting opportunity right now, less because I need to and more because it seems like something I can do that would be fun. I hope I'll get to say more next week. It felt good to see an opportunity, write up a quick proposal and ship it, and get some enthusiasm back. Hope it pans out!

I wanted to make hashtags link to something more useful on my micro.blog blog so I made a shortcode that takes a list of tags & turns them into tag links on social.lol. Wonder how it looks on Mastodon.

Update: Looks fine. The tags are rendered as links and the first link comes in at the end. I’ll test for no-link posts when I have a reason … that could be unattractive.

Screenshot of a Mastodon post with linked hashtags.

#hugo #shortcode #microblog 

Well, the happiest medium I can figure out for crossposting from micro.blog to Mastodon while still squeezing hashtags in without a lot of aesthetic mess seems to be using the <pre> tag in Markdown to enclose the hashtags.

If I put them at the bottom of the post, under the photos, they don’t stick out and just look sorta like a little line of metadata. At the same time, Mastodon can pick them up as linkable hashtags.

The other thing that can work is just putting two spaces in front of a line of hashtags. The Markdown parser doesn’t pick up the leading # as a head tag. I prefer the pre approach because it conveys a sort of “this isn’t content” look when posted to a blog.

As I sit here staring at this, it makes me wonder how easy it would be to write a useful-only-to-me Hugo plugin that just turns a pre-encased line of hashtags into links to … somewhere?

When I log out of social.lol and search for hashtags, I can see the results:

https://social.lol/tags/photography

… so it wouldn’t be a dead end. Wonder what happens to that when the Mastodon renderer picks it up.

Update: Seems to render fine.

Atlas Van Lines, 2023-01-23
Luther Rd. Natural Area, Springwater Corridor
Portland, OR

A trailer with the red logo &ldquo;Atlas Van Lines&rdquo; sits abandoned on a hill next to a tree.

#portland #pdx #SpringwaterCorridor #LutherRoadNaturalArea #photography

Coffee Walk, 2023-01-25
Springwater Trail, Foster Floodplain Natural Area
Lents, Portland, OR

Stopped through the Feral Cat Cove skate park on the way to the floodplain this morning.

Felix the Cat cartoon character painted onto the concrete of a skate bowl.

A cat walks through a concrete skate bowl, an orange grafitti cat seems to look down on it.

A tall, dead tree over a scrubby floodplain, brown in winter.

Cargo containers are stacked up in front of a misty mountain, under a gray sky.

#portland #pdx #FosterFloodplain #photography 

I left out the salmon I caught this morning, so here they are.

A bicyclist in yellow rides in the wrong direction in a bike lane in front of a building with a sign that reads &ldquo;Mt. Scott Bark Mulch&rdquo;