Adventures in Tech Land, Season 2
2019/12/16, day 9
Last year on November 16 I mentioned the sr.ht/ code hosting service. It happens that the owner and main developer is promoting his activity also through the use of blogs and has thus created a mailing list where blog writers who use his service can also discuss. I introduced myself there a few days ago and got comments right away about this site. The first one being that I had forgotten to specify the charset... For a multilingual user who knows what the absence of encoding/charset definition means, that was really a shame. I fixed that eventually.
The latest comment I had was last night, regarding the RSS feed I am manually generating as I documented on February 13. The XML was not validating for a number of reasons (mostly typos) and the general syntax did not respect interoperability recommendations. I hopefully fixed everything today and also added an RSS link to all the pages up to now, with some code in the template to add it automatically from now on.
The workflow that I have documented in the todo file is not really satisfactory. I find it a bit cumbersome. I feel that the introduction of git/magit in the process eases a lot of things but also makes the whole work depend on that (I describe now what I have committed during the day) instead of committing the work that I am doing here, which is what the blog is supposed to be about. Maybe it is because I am working on the "infrastructure" right now, so I should not worry too much. What matters, as I wrote yesterday, is that I use the tools as much as I can until they become a sort of extension of my fingers so that I can then put here what I want to express.
One of the commentators on reddit mentioned the book "The Little Schemer" as an example of how a book can direct self-learning as opposed to what I was doing in my Elisp introduction, so I checked the document and was surprised to find in the foreword written by Gerald Sussman of SICP fame, a reference to Ansel Adams and his "Zone System" that anybody who has done film photography has heard about. The idea was that to be able to take pictures like the ones made by artists, you had to know exactly the Zone system theory and all the technology that backed it. So, I'm not worried about spending a bit of time now in Emacs, in Magit, in org-mode, instead of writing HTML/CSS or Javascript and the likes. It will all come eventually, or maybe I'll find a better way to use all those tools and I'll end up walking a different path...