Planning Multiple Blogs Within One Github Pages Site
I'm planning to use Github Pages to host multiple blogs in one site, and I'm considering changes to my old content and URLs, as well as adding tags, a 'big list' of blog posts, pagination, and thumbnail embeds. My goal is to create a website that provides the wisdom of the ages, allowing for objective thought and accessible through any device or tablet. Come explore my digital portal and join me in creating a space of freedom and objectivity.
Explore My Digital Portal: Creating a Space of Freedom and Objectivity
By Michael Levin
Thursday, September 1, 2022
OMG, Sept 1st! Knock off one of your “Every Little Thing” that must get done. Test secondary sequences within Github Pages. The best instructions on how to do this appears to be https://www.garron.me/en/blog/multi-blog-site-jekyll.html
Yeow! Not as elegant as I had hoped, and it has serious ramifications on my category approach to making sub-blogs. It’s the same thing! Ugh. Okay, so let me think. This means that all posts are sort of thrown into one big vat and “default” prev/next arrows string them all together in one big sequence. Okay, this’ll be fine for bringing back my old content. I guess there’s no harm in allowing URLs to change now that my old content is effectively dead on the Internet with Google’s many algorithm changes over the years that have attacked the long-tail. Only “verbose” searches will turn them up.
This being the case, it’s probably best to “clean up my site” and the git repo that contains it by getting rid of all the separate date-named folders and index.md files that constitute my old blog after my WordPress export from HostMonster, a old fashioned CPanel web host I used before my switch to Github Pages. I pay my $100/year Microsoft tax for unlimited private repos and collaboration, and as a thrown-in feature, I also get unlimited hosting of static websites. This is effectively how I used everything I hosted on HostMonster, so I figure why not? So I sucked over all the data and transformed it into markdown arranged into files just-so to reproduce my original URLs. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff I just do for fun.
I did this before I understood the Jekyll _posts directory to create blogs and had I known, I’d have just used the blogpost file naming convention and had a much more tidy directory structure within the repo. As it was, I created a series of year/mo/blog-title/index.md locations. I mean, tons! And I can undo that. That’ll be my morning project before work gets underway, and the result will be you seeing the list of posts on my /vlog/ page expand… into the past woooooo!
But first, I’ll clearly be thinking a lot more about blog categories to get these lists under control. Always, I’ll be using this one long journal.md file as my master list of blog posts. So I’ll be pulling all the content from those directory structures into this file. It’s a giant concatenation, or consolidation of content from the past, if you will. I even have a much older Webmaster Journal from my Active Server Pages days that I may do this with, but I’m not sure how far back I want to go yet.
There’s a lot of tiny issues to work out, but I don’t have to work them out all at once. I can have confidence it’s going to all come together and have the flexibility to be gradually refined over time. Some issues that come to mind are:
- Do I really change the old URLs? Is there a way to preserve them?
- If not, is there an easy way to accomplish a good (301 / not meta) redirect list under Github Pages?
- Do I want to keep the 1-and-only-1 category-per-post scheme, or is it time for multiple-belonging tags?
- Will there ever be a “big list” of blog posts, unconstrained by a query? If so, do I implement pagination?
- Can I make the blog index pages more interesting with thumbnail embeds, especially YouTube ones when the post has a video?
Organization is key to so many things. If you can’t even keep yourself organized digitally, how can you expect to do so in real-life where things are that much more difficult? At least with digital, you have just one place to look (maybe 2 if you consider laptop and phone). But within laptop and phone, no matter how many remote, cloud and other locations you keep and organize things, because you access them through laptop and phone, they all count as being in a single place (your digital portal).
Alright, let’s discuss your digital portal. What’s a digital portal? It’s the platform such as laptop, phone and tablet you use to access the digital world&151;a world which, although it exits within the real-world, operates as something of a separate sub-world&151;a nested-reality, if you will.
Wisdom of the ages! That’s what I want to come across on my website. Freedom of thought. Immunity from group-think. Seeing things closer to objectively than comes naturally.