I've always kinda felt like when you make your own stuff, you want to use it more.

There's something about putting a lot of work into something that makes it so much more appealing. I think this is part of why I've had problems trying to be personal and talk about my interests on social media. I've gotten better at it, but I think it'll always feel a little weird to, like, talk about the cool stuff I'm making on a site I didn't make. Especially when a lot of my interests revolve around making software.

I've put a lot of work into making this blog easy for me to use... in my own special way. I actually only thought to make things easier because of this post by @ewie on Cohost:

@ewie

guys who are moving to blogs: you gotta make it easy to post

if you post a lot on cohost it’s almost certainly because you have it saved on your home screen and the work needed to make a new post is open the app and tap the compose button. you gotta make it just as easy to post on your own site! you’re not gonna use it as much if you don’t! it’s okay to spend way too much work up front ensuring the actual posting process is as seamless as possible, but it’s gotta be easy in the moment for you to go from dumb joke to posted dumb joke

I have a lot of opinions about this, but I ultimately agree: if it's hard to do, you won't do it. A lot of the joy I've derided from posting here is from building something and doing problem-solving, and there's a lot of problems to solve when it comes to "making software easy to use" in general. Let alone posting to a website.

I made a joke about this on Cohost, revolving around writing my blog post yesterday morning and, two hours later, deciding to streamline adding youtube embeds, which involved me having to individually re-write 26 posts, two times in one day. As infuriated as I sounded, I wouldn't have done it if I didn't at least find it a little bit satisfying. Despite all the trouble, it's made posting updates on I Post Music Every Day like 10x easier. I underestimated the power of making things easy. I usually don't have the time or energy to post both on there and Cohost on the same day. I usually end up bulk-adding a few posts every few days just so I don't have to deal with the seemingly minor inconvenience of copy and pasting the embed. Somehow, just copy and pasting a link was just easy enough that I was like "ok, yeah, sure, I'll go ahead and make the post".

All the work I had done before made me feel leisurely enough about posting that I felt like posting a picture of my new plushie... and I just did it lmao.

So, now I'm wondering how I can make things even easier...

Post embeds

Yesterday, I read this post by Natalie about reblogging posts with h-entry. I had started writing a script to pull in post data using h-entry classes, but then I was like. Hm. This might take me some time to actually launch before I can actually start posting, and I'd much rather set things up in such a way that if the content disappears off the internet, it's at least still here on my blog. So, only I made a generic post embed shortcode (so far). This is what it looks like (please don't make fun of my code, I wrote it in 10 seconds, I promise I'll fix it...)

eleventy.js:

eleventyConfig.addPairedNunjucksShortcode("genembed",
    function(content, data) {
        let url = data.url
        let icon = data.icon
        let author = data.author
        let title = data.title
        return '<div class="extpost-generic">' +
                    '<div class="posthead">' + // postheader
                        '<img class="icon" src="' + icon + '">' +
                        '<div class="author">' +
                            '<a href="' + url + '">' + author + '</a>' +
                        '</div>' +
                    '</div>' +
                    '<div class="postcontent">' +
                        '<span class="posttitle">' +
                            '<a href="' + url +'">' + title + "</a>" +
                        '</span>' +
                        content +
                    '</div>' +
                '</div>'
    }
)

whatever.md:

{%genembed
    url="",
    icon="https://file.garden/ZRVhuzccGFWyKuG3/awawawa.jpg",
    author="@babyguyyy",
    title="e"%}

waawaawwawawwaaawwaw

{%endgenembed%}

It ends up looking like this (after some styling):

@babyguyyy

e

waawaawwawawwaaawwaw

Doing this is what frustrated me enough to finally say "maybe I should be using just one template engine instead of two". This went exactly as well as you'd expect it to.

Of course, there are a few issues with doing this. I will not be addressing them at this time <3

I also have tons of little things I want to tweak about it, that I will also be putting off in favor of doing other things :)

Quickly, some other things I've worked on

I talked about this in another post, but I had this problem a while back that basically, I kept accidentally almost making repeat music posts, so I had planned to add an archives page and a generated csv that had a list of every post over there.

These things are all now complete. I even continued posting to that blog. I have a few things here and there I plan on doing, but as of now, I am considering it's basic functionality complete. I even fixed the issue of the styling just. Not showing up on the individual post's pages. Go check it out if you think it sounds cool!

I was going somewhere with this...

I had a much longer thing written out here about this, specifically about like... some of the mechanisms around getting attached to the tools you make and use. I was going somewhere much more interesting with this, but I think I might make a second part to this post because it's quite thematically different (and long). I'll do this... someday.

Thank you for tuning in tonight :)