Of Green Arrows and Red Armor
As a web publisher optimizing content for search engines, I chose Vim for its utility over Emacs and am competing with the younguns using proprietary IDEs. I'm editing 15 homepages at once with Jekyll, and wondering why everyone doesn't do the same. I'm a lawyer, so I'm always prepared for a fight. Join me in my journey as I explore the potential pitfalls of using a macro system and discover why Jekyll is the best choice for editing multiple homepages.
Exploring the Benefits of Jekyll for Editing Multiple Homepages
By Michael Levin
Thursday, May 5, 2022
The weakest link in the chain right now for my web publishing system is actually the content of the homepages across the sites. I don’t particularly want them to be found by Google yet, even though they are admittedly on the path to being wonderfully search optimized. I mean look at those previous/next arrows in the blog posts! Are they not works of art? Look on mobile. Look on desktop. Look at the top of the article where you might want to zoom through them for an overview. Look at them at the bottom of the articles where you might like to see the thinking that led-up to a thing or the thinking that immediately followed.
All I have to do is keep doing my thing, which is writing in vim which I do like breathing or walking at this point, and my web presence shall grow. Start embedding my YouTube videos as appropriate, and well you get it. I always say that my more mainstream success (because I do quite well as a secret weapon employee behind closed doors) is really just a matter of practicing what I preach and actually doing for myself what I advise clients to do. And so I am… now. At 50, LOL! Right when most people are giving up, I’m just taking off my gloves.
Okay, enough ego self-stroking. I know I’m good. But I’m also humble because I know I’m not as good as if I were using emacs become those assholes, they’re the real wizards. I just have a good bow-and-arrow (vim). For those who haven’t made the connection yet, vim is linear. \\VIM//. emacs is circular. eeemmmaaacccsss. This is the Yin and the Yang. I chose vim for it’s utility as a right-now tool that works pretty much the same way whichever instance of it you pick up, wherever you are with minimal customization. That is not the case with emacs. Emacs very strongly relies on deep customization to be useful in the way you need it. vim plays more like a videogame.
As Green Arrows Go, I’m a Pretty Good Guy
Who Just Wants What’s Best, Though There’s Piss In My Eye
My Armor Is Green ‘Cause I Didn’t Go Red
I Like Oliver Queen; There’s A Gun Overhead!
Others will choose emacs. And honestly I’m an emacsish person at heart. I know I’m an old softie and a stormy emotional creator, and not the green-attired bowman I make myself out to be. Fans of DC’s Green Arrow, Oliver Queen from the comics (not the TV version but the Comic/Cartoon DCU version who hates space guns) is a perfect example of Omega disguised as Alpha. From Alpha to Omega, you protect your soft inner core by adorning armor. Usually a Blue yin adorns shiny red armor, of course like Ironman. True blues hate being green. Abadi abadi. If I were green I would die. So they wear red. If you’re a blue who can’t bring yourself to wear red, you go black. Can you say Batman?
If you still don’t get it, sleep on it. Emotional intelligence through color comes over time. Studying cinema and storytelling can help. But in any case, I’m a total blue who picked up the very green vim. I looked at emacs and decided I actually wanted to compete professionally with the youngun’s using Notepad++ and VisualStudio.NET (not VSCode of today) and XCode at the time. It was totally obvious that the bottom was going to fall out from underneath of them with overweight vendor-dependent IDEs, which it did. And nothing was dominant in the free and open source software world at he time. There was no Github ATOM editor back then, and everything was proprietary, even EditPlus, TextMate and later Sublime. Learn a macro system, and bam! 10 years down the drain when the editor goes out of style.
So vim it was. If you need to know any further what was on my mind, then fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Think about it. That quote is an intelligence test. Our 41st president was not a very smart person. He won’t get fooled again. Oh, but we the public will, LOL! A very yin-president indeed. He could have used a little classic green arrow in his blood. Obama was green. Very green indeed. Lawyers always are. You don’t go into law if you don’t like your weapons able to take out the enemy with a single strike. We got death drones under Obama. We got carpet bombing all over again under GWB.
But I digress. I’m here to talk about homepages. I need to edit 15 homepages at once. However my main instance of vim that I keep on screen 1 of my ~7 virtual desktops without fail as an almost ritual every time I restart my machine (Yes, I’ve been called autistic) is already occupied with the 15 files that get sliced and diced into these blogs. And I am not going to mix the 2 systems. Homepages are homepages (as well as other miscellaneous pages throughout the site) and blog pages are blog pages. Jekyll knows this, and it’s part of the reason I chose it (aside from being built into Github). It makes these prev/next arrows a cinch. Why doesn’t everybody do that?