It’s been a while since I posted an actual blog post on this site, and I’ve been busy. Work makes me travel a lot, so that’s part of it. And a bunch of other things going on since I moved here to Florida.
More recently, I have been working on a lot of coding projects. And that’s what I want to post about. You might have noticed that this site just radically changed.
This site used to be on Squarespace. It’s a great platform, but it’s a little restrictive and very manual. There is no API interface to Squarespace for doing anything with blogs. Since I don’t really have the time to go in and do all that manual work, I decided I wanted to create something that was mostly automatic.
I still have to write the content and post it into the repo, but I decided I didn’t want to have to go out to Squarespace, copy snd paste the content, add images, do all of the SEO, etc. And their options for how it’s designed is very limited and controlled, which is on purpose for them and their target customers. I don’t think that I fit into that target customer base anymore.
With this site, this project is basically a static html site. I know, you think you are going back to the static HTML site. Not good, but it’s not true. There is a lot of automation behind it, and I can write in things like Obsidian while I am traveling and then just update the repo when I am connected.
Every night that repo is pulled down and the site is regenerated to static HTML. So I can make any changes that I want and test them remotely and do them in Obsidian, which is where I keep all my notes, my second brain. The updates just happens automatically on the site. I don’t have to go log into the site and make any changes. Plus I have designed a site more to how I thought it should have been originally.
Plus, I have added some cool new features that allow you to look at things I am working on real time. You’ll notice there is a section on here now about my repos. I have four github accounts and just one of the accounts alone has 140 repos in it. You can serch my repos, see the ones I have recently worked on, etc.
There are a ton of things going on that I am writing code in the background for. You see what projects I am working on real time as well and get more details on them. All of that is now done real time through automation in the back, and is generated nightly. And it’s generated from what is in the repo for my site, so I can update things as I go along. I can even test them locally on my machine to make sure they’re going to look okay, and then publish to the repo, which takes seconds to do. By the next morning, it’s updated.
This new site is one of the projects I’ve been working on. It’s not in the project list, but just know that this website is a new project and will be ongoing as well. I am also converting other sites that are on Squarespace down to the same type of format.
Again, it’s one of those things where Squarespace doesn’t give me the look or the abilities that I want, and it’s not designed for that. So it’s nothing on them. They’re designed to be for people who don’t want to have to know the back end and have some quick design choices.
The problem is those design choices are very limited, and the interaction outside of Squarespace is very limited. With the exception of if you’re selling a product. Their APIs for the commerce side are not bad.
There is going to be another post coming soon for something else I’ve been working on. I’ve been doing a lot with AI and I have an interesting scenario I am going to bring up and do a completely different post on that one. So hang on for that.
And I do have a couple more videos that I want to start bringing out as well. I am getting a little more time. While I am still traveling some, I May have to make those videos while I am traveling. I’ll be carrying some cameras and stuff with me to do some of that while I’m traveling.