Currently reading: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚
Off to a good start!
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
Updated my Hugo poster to includes time and tz offset:
If you’re using omg.lol’s git workflow, this version ought to work:
Don’t forget to tweak line 15.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
Saturday Coffee Walk, 2023-01-28 (Exteriors)
Foster Road
Portland, OR
Saturday Coffee Walk, 2023-01-28 (That Fence Edition)
Mt. Scott/Arleta
Portland, OR
Saturday Coffee Walk, 2023-01-28 (Little Things)
Mt. Scott/Arleta, Foster Road
Portland, OR
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.
Mt. Hood from Horse Thief Butte, 2023-01-26
Columbia River Gorge
Washington
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.
#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.
#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.
#ColumbiaRiverGorge #BridgeOfTheGods #photography #Washington #PNW #fujifilm
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
So I added metadata to my card notes:
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.
Pretty good!
This was an amazingly social week by my standards:
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.
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
#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.
I left out the salmon I caught this morning, so here they are.