Eric Walker

So I tried to make a post yesterday and had no idea why I didn’t see it, figuring it would show up eventually. This morning, when I still didn’t see it, it dawned on me. I didn’t put the .md at the end of it, so the file was never picked up and posted. 🤦‍♂️

It’s a good thing to remember that adding .md is a better way to create a draft than putting “draft” in the top section, at least if you are using GitHub. Because I found out, even if you put “draft” at the top of your file, it might not show up on your main post pages. But when you do searches, especially for tags, you will find the file.

Yesterday’s entry and this one are all coming from my phone. I installed Working Copy which I connect to GitHub. With this setup, it’s quite nice. It gives me a time that I can actually create a post like this one right here offline and then push it when I’m ready. Seeing how I am sitting at a swim meet typing this out and waiting for my daughter to swim which will be in another hour.

My only issue with Working Copy is that on my phone it is not giving me predictive text or correcting my bad spelling that is happening due to me typing on this phone. Not the end of the world but a little annoying, but I also know why it makes sense to not have it correct or give suggestions as normally people would use this app to write code. Maybe I will start drafting this in a different text editor and then just use Working Copy to post.

I know this is only day 4, but I think the more I mess around with weblogs, the more I seem to like it.

I have spent way more time than I would like to admit messing around with weblog.lol today. However, I am pleased with the overall result as I have a working website with an updated theme that I am happy with in the direction it is taking. I jokingly say working because for the life of me, the box below I cannot get to format right, no matter what I do. However, if you look at it now, it probably looks good enough that no one will be the wiser on how much effort I spent tinkering with it.

Reflecting back, I realized that since I haven’t really touched this site since a year ago, I had some very old configurations and knowledge of what was going on (not that I really had the right knowledge to begin with). So, some of my time today was spent watching a very helpful video Adam (the creator of weblog.lol and omg.lol) put together earlier last year, as well as diving into some webpage source codes. Only to then find out some very nice people have their weblog.lol sites like mine on GitHub with it open to view the configuration files. I’m not sure if those people meant to have them as public projects on GitHub, so I will not link directly to them, but I do appreciate that they did, as I could get some ideas of how things were done by doing that. I am not really sure if I will end up closing mine off and making it private, as I am not sure if there is anything here that should be closed off. However, if I do, I will make sure to link to a copy of my template and configuration files, as those are the things really helpful if you are a noob like me when it comes to weblog and honestly CSS.

If you are wondering what is next with this site, it is still to be determined, but I have enjoyed my time diving into it and flexing my brain in a way I normally don’t on a day-to-day basis. Maybe I will try to post something on here every day for February and see how that goes.

Digging back in to the configurations and setting of Weblog.lol allowed me to find out that you can have titleless posts now. Kind of nice for someone that is used to having so many of those on Micro.blog.

It works, but how does this work again?

With all of the new fun blogging tools that have been coming out lately, I have been wanting to try every single one of them, and I am probably still missing some of them. However, here are the ones that caught my eye, and I have tried two of them, and I know the other one would be amazing too:

• Pika.Page by the awesome people who make fun things at Good Enough
• Scribbles by Vincent Ritter, who makes some really cool projects that you should check out.
• Gibber or Gibberish is the app - The idea of it being like text messages really is an interesting concept.

However, as I had been trying some of these and almost pulled the trigger to try the other one, I thought to myself. I still have this amazing weblog.lol site that I have not touched for a year that I should get back to. If anything, just to see what it is all about and what has changed, so maybe that is what I will do instead of diving too much further into the three listed above. In fact, as I was messaging Barry Hess who helped create Pika.Page briefly about this exact topic, I found his response just refreshing when I said I am not sure I can fully switch to another platform:

Not a problem! If you have something that fits the bill, of course, we’d love to have you along for the ride. But don’t force it!