I went over plenty of stuff on my about page so I think I'll just jump in to today's focus: this blog!
I've used many different technologies to spin up blogs for others. My personal favorite tends to be Wordpress but I thought I'd do something different for this. I figured that since I'm doing programming practice anyways, I could make the site build itself using programming! Well, some of it at least. I may enjoy AI but I enjoy writing my own pieces more. What does that leave for the program then? Well, everything else really. This site is made up of a bunch of files hosted on a server. Normally, I'd have to write every link on every page by hand. If I was smart, I'd have a default layout and just copy things over. That makes it hard to update though if I get tired of the way it looks.
I should really work on the name of it but the HPN Generator is a Python project that takes smaller pieces of website and sticks them together like Lego to make this site all fancy. These templates I've split into multiple pieces: the header with the logo and navigation pieces, the post, and the footer down at the bottom. By themselves, these templates are pretty barren of content. So where does this post live? It lives in a .md file that has things like the title and date entered in. There's also this entire post in it too. When I finish typing up a post in VSCode, I run the generator and it connects all the pieces and spits out the finished website. Then I replace the files on the server with the new ones and the website is updated!
That's a pretty high level view of everything but it's straightforward. The benefits of this over something like Wordpress are...minimal. Yes, doing things this way makes a static site (a webpage that only has to load files) that runs fast but the tradeoff is all of the features in a full content management solution (CMS) like Wordpress need to be done by hand. Which is also what makes this really good programming practice for me. That's also why I didn't go with other static site generators like Pelican. It's an awesome site generator that I almost used. The only reason I didn't was I felt like practicing my own Python skills while I made this blog.
Because I'm nerdy, I decided to make all of this from scratch. What's next? Honestly, I have little planned in advance here which is really abnormal for me. I spend a lot of time planning out how I want things to go so off-the-cuff stuff like this is unique territory. I'll do a deeper dive on the technical stuff on another post. Human Patch Notes is a place for me to share whatever it is that's making my today interesting without feeling that it's irrelevant to my site. As such, my vision is to consistantly post on here. I currently aim for a 10 minute minimum of writing every day but usually end up doing 30-45 minutes. I'll split it on blog posts here, practice prompts (which may also end up here), and book work (which will be discussed here on occasion). While it may not be a post every day, with regular effort it will add up quickly.
Other than that, I plan on adding features to the site. First I'm going to make everything look a lot prettier. It's very...90s currently. After that I'm thinking about improving navigation, sharing features, some kind of dark mode toggle, rss feeds and better indexing.. There's a lot of different things I could do. It just depends on what I feel like doing for coding practice. I know at some point it will migrate away from a purely static site (especially if I do a comment system) but I'd like to keep it as static as possible. Another thing I'm toying with the idea of is native VR support and a basic suggestion box.
At this point, I'm rambling again. I promise the next blog posts will be more focused. Nebulous stuff like this is fine on occasion but I'd really like to talk about some of my other goings-on. My home server lab has some cool projects, I've been experimenting a little more with the pressure cooker, and my I probably need a vacation from my staycation this week. Either way, thank you for reading. I look forward to the journey ahead!