I said I was interested in changing up The Column. This is me doing that. For future reference, this is the first post I’m writing after my move from Blogger to a GitHub Pages-hosted Jekyll-based personal blog using a barely-modified minimal mistakes theme.
The new & improved Column is mostly for my own benefit. I’m excited to be able to write posts using markdown, which has been my flavor of the month for the past two or three months running. If you don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it. Mostly it makes quite excited to write more.
The Implications
The format of all future posts may look more like this and less like posts #2 thru #375. Internal links to previous posts will (probably) stop working - and the formatting from those old posts may or may not look like garbage, I’m not too worried about it. I plan on keeping my Top 5 and Quotes sections, so not much is changing. At least not on that front. You’re going to probably start seeing a lot more structure in each given post, though. Section headings are a big reason I like Markdown & will be more prevalent. Also more prevalent: typos! At least if I write using my laptop.
Soon I’ll figure out how to do internal links to section headers & include a table of contents with each Column.
Recap of Personal Projects Currently in Flight
I’ve been doing a lot of stuff lately. In addition to the long-running “Life Tracker” and “30 Day Challenge” projects, I’ve decided recently to:
- Move the Column of Blogger (done as of today!)
- Revamp (and rename) the Life Tracker
- This one alone could be enough to take up all of my time for a few months, I’m aiming much higher
- Learn how to do my new(ish) role at work
- Learn Python
- I actually used Python the other day to accomplish something relating to this Blog - it was super gratifying
- Start to make additions to the house - we’ve lived here for a few years and haven’t really improved it in any meaningful way
- Writing articles for my knowledge center “Gillespedia”, which is a much worse-looking website than this (frankly they just exist in my Notion right now)
- Recording Podcasts with my buddies Richard & Guy 1
- Change up my workout routine (done a while back, but I’ve committed to continually changing it every 8 weeks, so now that’s an on-going thing)
- Reduce, reuse, recycle - I’ve got more interest in taking up habits to minimize my impact on the environment
- I’ll write more about this eventually, it’s another one of those unsexy solutions situations I wrote about in Post #291
I don’t know what I’d do if I weren’t doing stuff like this. Probably just get fat or something.
Top 5: Benefits of the New Setup
- I feel cooler
- I get more control over how this looks (although right now it’s very much not something I’ve got a handle on)
- I have a local repository of my posts on my computer
- I can write using Markdown, in a text editor, & do version control via GitHub, all of which makes me feel cool
- I get to practice using all of the above, so I could (in theory) apply those skills to other projects.
There will actually be better benefits once I figure out all my newfound powers. Like footnotes1.
Quotes
You and Markdown, man. Ugh.
- Nick
COWABUNGA!
- The Cookie Monster, who’s quickly become my favorite philosopher
-
“See what I mean?” ↩