Weeknotes 5

A first for me again this week as I moved some holding pages for a couple of domains to GitHub Pages. The setup was fairly easy once I grokked the DNS changes required. It’s a shame that GitHub’s help pages have become more and more “enterprise-y” over the last few years though.

I wrote some Bash this week. Strangely I’ve never really written any Bash professionally (if you can call it that) before, only ever in my own tinkering with side projects. It’s surprisingly difficult to do the most basic things and there are always half a dozen ways. How many systems are glued together using Bash?

I’m working on getting a TIL site up and running. Since I first saw Josh Branchaud do this I’ve thought it was a great idea. I’m not keen on categorizing TILs using directories and manually keeping an index though.

I like the pureness of just having documents stored as a collection of Markdown documents in directories, but without any metadata stored against the files it’s hard to do tagging.

I’m considering storing TILs as Markdown but with frontmatter that Hugo can read and build, but keeping the documents separate from the build. One way to achieve this that I stumbled upon is using an orphaned branch in Git which shares no history with other branches. This allows having one branch for content only and one for the build tool setup, in this case Hugo.

You can create an orphaned branch like this:

git checkout --orphan <name>

I’ll explore this idea soon.