Something of an update...
Okay, so, I've put it on my to-do list to actually post something here for the last...wait, it's been three weeks already?!? Time sure does fly...
ANYway, the cause for the delay is three-fold (four if you count my natural proclivity for procrastination):
- Desire to move to WordPress
- Desire to convert all articles to Markdown
- Where I wanted to start is an already partially written series
WordPress Ho
The great blue yonder
Squarespace has been great to me overall, but I've felt it a bit limiting for what I want to do pretty much since I started using it so many years ago. Everyone else was using WordPress it seemed, but I was stubborn and wanted to make it work with the great platform that I learned about on TWiT (This Week in Tech). It just seems to be more geared for a different kind of website.
Since WordPress has been the choice for this sort of website for so many, it serves to reason that there will be a lot of resources out there to help if and when I need it. It's also a platform that I can host myself at some point, and I imagine moving from the flagship site to my own hosting will not be difficult if I ever decide to go that way.
Markdown: It's what's for dinner?
I mean, who doesn't?
Okay, that one was a bit corny, but Markdown is not. It's a great way to layout text documents using nothing but text, without having to fuss with HTML. And it even supports HTML if you need some of that.
What's most important, though, is Markdown is widely understood: Squarespace understands it, WordPress understands it, even GitHub understands it. The formatting is handled by the platform and themed to look right, so all I have to focus on is the layout and the content.
The best part is, since it's all text, I can store it in a GitHub repo. In fact, unlike my previous posts (which I typed and laid out in the Squarespace editor directly), I'm writing this post as a .md text file on my workstation into a git repo that's connected to GitHub. Once I'm done, all I have to do is commit the change and copy the text into a Squarespace post to publish it.
So, once I have my posts (new and old alike) converted over to Markdown, I'll be able to move to the next step of transitioning fully over to WordPress: posting all my old content there to get it ready to take over. (I've already moved over to using it for my image storage; the images in this post are hosted on WordPress)
Error handling: it's only been...five years...
Something went wrong...
In a couple months, it will be the six year anniversary of posting the first (and only) part of my Error Handling series, the overview chapter. I mean, I could argue that I wrote the Basic Primer just a little over three years ago, which is kind of part of the series, even if not officially...
In spite of the series being rather not-finished with only the two parts, I've found myself sending the links to them to people who were struggling with error handling concepts over the years, having to explain that I've not gotten around to finishing them, and learning that even what I did write is helpful to people. So, a healthy combination of embarrassment and encouragement.
My plan at this point is to go over those two posts, convert them both to Markdown (one is already converted, though I've not uploaded the change to the site), and finish the series. I'm going to look to see what tricks have been added to PS 7 (I think there's a couple that would be useful) and make sure those get covered as well, and I'm going to go back over the two and give them a round of polish as well (and properly induct the primer as an official part of the series). Also, rather than updating them in-place, I'm going to fully re-publish them and add a link from the old versions to the updated ones.
Once the series is done, I'm going to ensure that there are links from each post to find the rest (always annoying to find the middle post of a series with no links provided to the other parts), and put a link to the series somewhere on the site to make it easy to find from anywhere.
Last notes
Did I get everything?
I've done a lot over the last few years. I wish this site had been one of them, but I plan to correct that now. My goal is to finish the series over the next few weeks, and converting other articles from the past as I go to prep for the move to WordPress. I have no idea how long that's going to wind up taking, but I have every intention of maintaining this site on Squarespace as long as I'm here and fixing the minor bugs that have cropped up over the years of neglect.
I know I've probably lost any followers that I might have at one point had, but hopefully, at least somebody is reading this and will get some benefit from what I'm going to be working on posting in the near future. I look forward to what the future will bring.