Ok, we’re back. I guess I’ve been avoiding this part of the whole blog thing for some time. You know, the writing part. It’s been over 2 years since my last post.
It’s so weird. I’ve spent over an hour getting the local environment setup with a Jekyll server just so I can see what the damn blog post looks like and if the links are working properly.
Mostly I’ve been getting OpenAI to do my troubleshooting. It’s helpful because I have a tendency to skip ahead or just brute force my way through things which can feel like it’s fast but takes longer overall. Unless you can ask for help constantly by a bot that doesn’t get annoyed at me taking a little while to get things.
This is the thing I’m not sure I’ve covered properly before but I have this desire to be able to make my website from within a text editor. The old fashioned way, I guess.
I don’t know what that’s about. Something to do with form. A website, like a book, is comprised of pages after all. Unlike a book, the meaning of a website is encoded in layers from the expressly human readable to the 1s and 0s of pure machine language.
The web page is limited in how these layers combine to form an artistic illusion in a way that more complex digital media aren’t. What video game developers see, the interaction of textures and programs and sub-programs and physics engines, is far greater than the final interaction: playing the game.
Consider the most basic website in flat HTML. When you look at the code your browser reads, it can still be as readable as the final form.
Then again, a lot of websites aren’t designed for you to venture beyond the top layer. I find it strange to view the page source for a page with an otherwise aesthetically elegant design and get hit by a wall of indecipherable garbage.
That’s just modern publishing, though. You need a proper content management system (CMS) to do all the things that a modern CMS lets you do easily. Templated design, integration with other products, especially email lists, ads, and other ecommerce thingos.
TIME PASSES
It is now the next day. I was up until midnight messing around with this stuff. There’s been some weird problems with getting Jekyll to install on the version of Ruby I had which probably could have been avoided by going directly to the Jekyll site and following instructions there instead of relying on ChatGPT. Like, it worked in the end. The problem was that I installed the latest version of Ruby when I needed 2.7. Anyway, it was a useful lesson and I have now, at 9.50am the next day, finally got Jekyll serving my site to localhost. This gets the blog back to where it was in 2022, basically. Oh well, at least it works. Now what?