Edit 10 Blogs, Homepages or Templates All At Once
I'm breathing new life into MikeLev.in, creating a \_layouts folder in each repo with a default.html file to get my Google Analytics code on each site. I've also created helper-scripts to edit all my site-files at once and am putting rudimentary site-navigation links in place. I'm considering switching gears to make it about previous/next blog, so stay tuned for more updates!
Breathing New Life into MikeLev.in: Creating a layouts Folder and Using Helper-Scripts to Edit Files
By Michael Levin
Saturday, April 30, 2022
Okay, so I am breathing new life into MikeLev.in. I struggled to figure out which of my registered domains I should put this sort of open-ended rambling writing into and had settled on whatsametafor.io due to its very ambiguity. But now I’m thinking it may be a distraction. Where does the .io extension come from? Is the price going to be hiked on me every year like the .me?
Either way, it’s best to develop this site since it exactly matches my name and I don’t see my name changing anytime soon. I should consider the purpose to which I put Mike-Levin.com. It was my personal “exact match” domain even older than MikeLev.in. I should look at link toxicity reports however based on it, considering it was in the hands of Russian spammers for so many years.
In either case, they are both important assets to me. This one will carry on the momentum I had started in the early and mid 2010’s. And now instead of just random open-ended writing, I should use this to think through my next step. What is the least time-consuming, energy-consuming path to accelerating my advancement? Where is the biggest bang for the buck?
Try putting dates into the blog index page. It would be useful to see when things were published from that page. Nice, okay. I’ll keep that for a bit. But now go look at the Liquid template system. Start taking control of your Github Pages Jekyll templates. I’m using Hacker everywhere right now, but that can only last for so long.
I’ve already created a _layouts folder in each repo with a default.html file in each in order to get my (up-to-date) Google Analytics code on each site. I’ll be making a post on that soon. But this gives a convenient place to start experimenting with overriding the Hacker template. I’m already sort of doing that, so try putting some site-wide navigation in default.html.
Okay, I have a bunch of helper-scripts now that help me edit all my site-files at once. I can edit all my journals at once, which makes copy/pasting entries between them very easy. I can edit all my homepages at once and all my default.html’s at once.
- ./all.sh
- ./homepages.sh
- ./defaults.sh
And my release script and .vimrc file (vim configuration) are actually always loaded right along with my journal files. In this way, I can continually improve my release system and text-editing environment organically over time.
I’m one of those people who really doesn’t believe in plugins because of plugin dependency syndrome. You should more-or-less be able to sit down at almost any system, get vim installed and be fairly productive by just dropping your .vimrc into location. One file and poof! Familiar editing environment.
By editing all my default.html’s, I put the most rudimentary site-navigation links in place. It’s just switching between “Home” and “Blog”, but hey it’s a start.
Hmmm. I think this is going to evolve to being about previous/next blog post links rather than about Liquid templates. Because I’m controlling the output of each and every blog-post programmatically with my blogslicer package, it seems that I should switch gears to make it about that.
Hmm, nope. It should be a wholly separate post that I put over there on Pythonic Ally site.