Posts about Blog

I’ve been playing with Hugo for other sites and liking it a whole lot.

I used it to host my next site, the KC3WWC Amateur Radio Blog. I’ll collect all my notes on amateur radio over there. I had been keeping a running document in org-roam, so it’s now time to make it public.

I was only trying to write that last article, but it took me days to finally do it. I had so much work to do before I got there.

I had come to appreciate Emacs automatically inserting the boilerplate namespace declarations in new Clojure files, and I really thought I needed such convenience for my blog posts written in AsciiDoc in JBake. I dove down a 20-tab-deep, yak-shaving hole to get it done. ^[1]

I had to figure out the right search terms and names for what Emacs was doing for me. I finally found yatemplate which seems similar to yasnippets. Spacemacs has the templates layer for integrating yatemplate support, so I added that layer and created a template for my adoc files in my .emacs.d directory. My simple case worked, but I recognized that I’ll want that template on all my machines, so having a local copy of it wouldn’t cut it. I needed a way to check-in and version more Emacs/Spacemacs files than just my ~/.spacemacs files I was previously distributing.

I learned yasnippets would default to looking in ~/.spacemacs.d/ if the configuration was in there, so I had to move my ~/.spacemacs file over to ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el. To have the templates layer source templates from the .spacemacs.d directory, it required an extra bit of configuration when introducing it to the dotspacemacs-configuration-layers:

At this point, I could now commit my .spacemacs.d directory with the regular configuration file and the supporting templates and snippets. All those files will be cloned to all my workstations.

I was almost ready to write that article, but yasnippet and yatemplate have this fancy templating language. I’m sure that can make my article-creation even smarter! I read a bit more and found a couple cool elisp functions for automatically filling in the date and building a title from the file name. With the final enhancements to my adoc template, I could write the article, if I could only remember what I was trying to do in the first place. I hope to at least remember how to use these snippets and templates for future work.

Since the beginning when I rebuilt my blog with JBake, I intended to split and restyle the photography work from the tech work.

The photo work just disappeared from here, so now it can be found at John Flinchbaugh Photography.

Both sites are rebuilt whenever new content is pushed to their respective git repositories.

JBake 2.5.0 got support for the MarkupTemplateEngine, so I wanted to give it a try, since structured code will be nicer than extreme scriptlet stuff that was happening in the original Groovy template example. The stock MTE example shows off MTE templates, but it also switched to Foundation in place of Bootstrap.

I’ve been looking forward to really learning Bootstrap for work and my personal projects, so I’m not looking to switch frameworks right now, so I rebuilt my own example project with MTE and Bootstrap based on the original Groovy/Bootstrap sample I had previously used.

Hopefully, I’ll get a little feedback and the JBake people will incorporate my contribution.