Adventures in Tech Land, Season 3
2021/10/23, day 46

Restarting an old engine rss feed

and trying to make sense of all that...

Reading the past logs is saddening. I remember everything. Everything I wrote, when I wrote it, how I felt when I wrote it. I remember how it was at the beginning of January 2020, when we were getting ready to move into that apartment. There was some happiness, at least the hope that we'd be able to create something new that we had never tried before. Then I remember the covid news that started to slip in. We were together again at the end of March, with restrictions already ongoing, and then the world kind of stopped. Today we are stuck in an even harder place. There is mental pain almost every day, and very little hope to account for. It is hard to focus on important things. And work, as well as money is severely lacking.

I have a book to write, that I can't focus on. I have new activities, one as a part-time remote lecturer for a French university, teaching computer aided translation to an MA class, another one as a contracted OmegaT consultant for a big organization. I've also rebooted a long time forgotten MA in Japanese studies. Things that might not have happened without the pandemic, but the MA has reverted to on-site teaching and my director won't answer my mail. And all this feels like it's a bit too little, and maybe too late anyway.

Yesterday evening, after the dishes were done, the kitchen cleaned and coffee accessories ready for this morning, I thought about all the repositories that were only gathering dust on my machine. Our second son, now in high school, kind of wants to learn HTML, I have a number of projects here and there, all related to technology, but never going deeper than a few lines of code, and this "web tech thing" that I started here back in November 2018 is still itching. I enjoy working in Emacs, and I enjoy writing bits of code.

So, last night, I took my machine to bed and I reopened all the files. One by one. Trying to make sense of them. Trying to remember what I was trying to accomplish, close to 2 years ago now. I read the elisp code and wondered how I had been able to write it in the first place. Then I tried to run it, it failed, I checked the error messages, sometimes a bit too cryptic to make sense of, and I plowed through the code, changed a few pieces and bits here and there, and after about an hour, the engine started again.

I was able to create the RSS feed and this index. It looks like I had added some more automation. I'll check that later. I was doing moderately complex things here, at least in terms of organization. I had that idea that I could create my own CMS, only with elisp. I remember all the discussions that were generated in the emacs-devel list when I did not understand a given function. I like that feeling. So now, I can't promise I'll write or code every day, but I'll try. I need to find the energy to commit myself to the things that really matter. If this thing allows me to do that, it's all the better.

So, see you tomorrow, hopefully.

ps: the small page of code that is behind these pages is here, as an html file: adventuresintechland.el