sym vs blog host (and webmastery)
(note: this post sat in my drafts, and was originally made september 13th! i'm just now finishing it so it can be published.)
so the past week or two i really got into working on my blog again. i wanted to work on it the past few months, but due to the fact that my hard drive crashed (which i'll get into another time), i didn't get the opportunity to fully do so until recently.
and man was it a fight to figure out what i wanted!
i moved hosts so that i would be able to use wordpress for my blog, and also for an eventual comic host... but i ended up not wanting to use it for either!
wordpress has a lot of bloat for me it seems, and the themes were sort of the same!
i thought about maybe making my own theme, but the amount of work i would have had to do was wayyy out of my range of knowledge. i also figured if i was making a theme, i may as well just make a full html blog and call it a day!
i'm still using bearblog for the time being, cause it's not done!
however, since bearblog isn't self hosted, and i wanted to pair down on external things for my website, i had to pick something else
i ended up using zonelets, which is funny, since i had considered using it a while ago before i found out about bearblog.
with zonelets, i figured that i could find ways to modify it in a way so it served me better!
my specifications were simple1—
- i wanted to have tags for my blog posts
- i wanted to write my blog post in markdown
in the process of trying to figure out a tag system, i ended up coming across a few different variants of zonelets forks and enhancements that I thought were interesting, but ultimately ended up being cumbersome for me to pick up and understand.
zoner
zoner is a static site generator that was made to make zonelets-styled blogs. it was one of the first things i found when trying to look for added extensions for zonelets, most notably being able to type in markdown like I can in bear. i'll have to admit, i think i'm just at a level where i don't understand the nuance that goes into a static site generator— it goes over my head despite watching getting started video guides. maybe my computer just fights with me, or i'm in over my head when it comes to working with one. i did try to attempt to download and use it, but the attempt didn't last long, and i was getting frustrated.
zonelots
zonelots is a fork of zonelets that has tagging and a bunch of other javascript framework. i will say, i didn't use this one for long, primarily due to the fact that i was using a fork of this version (which i'll get to in a bit), and so i abandoned the whole framework all together in favor of the base zonelets. i think if i was a bit more patient, i would have figured it out, but it definitely also felt a bit too bulky for what i needed right now. maybe in the future, i may return to it!
bumblebee
bumblebee is a framework fork of zonelots, which has automation capabilities with python. it looked really cool! but i felt like i was constantly fighting with python. i opted to go back and just use it without, but it felt like a lot of unnecessary pieces (for me) that i didn't need, and i hate using things with code i'm not using. so! i gave up on this endeavor as well. however, i may go back and use the js page index. possibly.
eventually, i gave up trying to figure out how to make my posts in markdown, and opted to do a converter so i wasn't speed-typing my thoughts while also trying to remember all the syntaxes in html.23
but... what about tagging?
what i did settle on using is 3legged's zonelets tagging system, but it wasn't working for some reason, so i pulled the javascript from chostett, who said they tweaked the code a bit. and it worked!
i still have some adjustments to make, but it's turning out nicely! 🙌
it might be my permanent/long term blog!
since it's going to be my 'notebook' all in one4, i have some adjustments i'd like to do for it before it going live. especially perhaps circling back around to that js page index, maybe. not sure yet! at the time i was working on my words and pictures comic jam entry, so i decided to take a break and work on it later.
i still have some stuff i wanna add, so i'll be uploading it to the site later! also after i figure out how to do rss manually... please bear with me! i've been coding for almost 2 years now, but i still don't know what im doing 😅 i think part of the reason i want to self host everything is so everything stays organized, too.
which I later discovered wasn't simple at all 🥲↩
im a yapper 😔 i just wanna type, i felt like long-term i may not write blog posts as much if it meant i had to set up a bunch of html while/after making the posts every time. so! a converter would be best for me. markdown was ideal because I already type in that way when talking on discord.↩
which i later turned into using bearblog still, for the time being at least, and copying the html to paste for my website. is this considered the mirror if i make the posts here first? 🤔 regardless, i wanted it self hosted version of my blog!!!!↩
you heard it here first, folks!↩