$ ❯ CrowderSoup

Today is Father’s day, a day where we celebrate the dad’s in our lives. Rather than write an appreciation post though, I wanted to write about something that men everywhere can do better. That’s why I decided to write about apologizing. It’s something that few men do, and even fewer do well. Even worse I’ve seen so many instances lately where men are directly asked to apologize and refuse to. But the point of this post isn’t to call anyone out.

I have recently started using Qutebrowser (again, lol). I wanted to write / use some simple user scripts to add some functionality, but on OSX I was having some issues with things not being in my PATH. I didn’t realize why / what was happening so I asked in the issues of Qutebrowser on github and quickly got my answer. It turns out that for GUI apps on OSX they don’t inheirit the path that you set in your shell profile.

I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up Mastodon on my own server for a while now. Today I finally got around to actually doing it (after a failed attempt a couple months ago). I found a guide that I loosely referred to and was immensely helpful at a couple points. At first I tried running on a super small $5 instance, which seemed fine during setup, but died every few requests when I started using it.

This site has had a couple new themes lately, but I’ve finally settled on one: Basics Plus. This is actually a theme that I’ve forked from Basics. It’s a fairly simple and paired down theme. I forked it so that I could change a couple things: The top menu (more dynamic, able to add more items) Add Disqus comments The byline These are some fairly small feature changes. I plan to make more changes / refinements going forward while keeping the clean / simple look and feel.

I’ve been making some efforts to streamline the publishing process for this site. I’ve read about tools like Netlify and Lektor, but I wanted to keep things as close to a basic Hugo site as possible. To that end, I wanted to use git hooks to run hugo whenever I ran git commit. That way to publish a new post I simply had to write it in markdown, save, commit and push.

Using HTTPS for your site has lots of benefits. Chief among them being security. Using HTTPS ensures that no one can intercept and read traffic between you and the site you’re visiting. However, it’s traditionally been somewhat difficult and expensive to provide HTTPS for your sites visitors. Now though, with Let’s Encrypt an SSL certificate is free! And if you’re using GitHub pages with a custom domain for hosting using it couldn’t be easier.

I’ve added my Keybase Proof as a text file at the root of this site. I used to have my site proven via DNS but for whatever reason CloudFlare removed my TXT record breaking the proof. I decided that having the .txt file proof was more resilient because even if I change hosting (Currently on Github Pages) my proof will remain intact. If you aren’t on Keybase check it out. I like to think of it as “crypto-as-a-service”.

Last night I got the wild hare to migrate my personal site from Pelican to Hugo. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while now, so to give myself the push I needed to get it done I deleted my old personal site from Github. Differences Front Matter Honestly the biggest different for content is “front matter”. Both Hugo and Pelican, as static site generators, use front matter to describe pieces of content.

Yesterday I learned a neat trick with Visual Studio Code when working on some PowerShell scripts to help orchestrate build and deployment of our projects (more on that in a different post). I knew that VSCode had a debugger, but I didn’t realize that a debugger for PowerShell had been added via an extension. I had installed this extension some time ago to help with writing PowerShell scripts in VSCode, but I was running my PowerShell prompt in another window to actually test them.

A couple months ago I decided I needed to be better about telling my wonderful wife how much I loved her on a daily basis. Being the nerd that I am I decided to tackle this using IFTTT and a custom web app. For this project I went with Django to build my app out. I’d never used it before so I wanted a chance to play with it. The idea The idea is pretty simple.