I’m excited for December Adventure 2024, where I’ll code a bit every day of the month and write about it. Last year I participated and worked for a month on designing a new website. When the month ended I hadn’t finished, and I ultimately made some different design decisions than I experimented with. But I did use a lot of the knowledge I gained, and I learned what I didn’t want to do as well. In particular, I made comprehensive class-free CSS stylesheets, learned about automation with custom templates for pandoc, and developed approaches to building galleries with flexbox. I worked on image conversion scripts, and accessibility. I also learned about the limitations of using markdown and bash with variables as a templating language. All of this and much more I put to work in the class websites I made in the spring afterwards, and finally in my website redesign that I completed in the spring.
This year, I don’t have a single project but instead a number of little things I’m interested in exploring. I probably can’t get to all of them. And I’ll let myself wander depending on my interests.
Currently, these are my ideas of things to play with:
I probably will only try a small handful of these, but it’s nice to have some options in mind.
Okay, I’ll be back December 1. Let’s see if I stick with this color palette!
I started early.
I checked out markdown-lichen, a project by online/irl friends of mine. It’s a gui wrapper around markdown-based static CMS. I did some testing in straight php and it worked mostly fine without being able to render built html pages. I had a chat with Max on Masto about implementing it to work without requiring docker, apache or nginx, since the goal is to be lightweight. They thought that should be doable. Will come back to this project and do more tests probably at that point. I guess I could always look into php myself but it does not fill me with joy. I’m hoping Max implements it, then I could add in documentation and run some tests.
Next I researched the Picotron fantasy workstation to see if I wanted to purchase and play around with it. I found some cool projects, checked out the terminal, API, ran some programs online. Ultimately, I didn’t find something to excite me enough to work on, so I’m going to pause on that for now.
Next, I worked on a web project. Some colleagues are in an exhibit opening in a month in LA and need a timebased 24-hour work to display in a website, updating once a second, as part of a show. Consider it something like a 24-hour long video with a framerate of 1 frame per second. They asked if I could make it happen. I developed a simple system and implemented a test, building out a simple site for them to check speed, image resolution, and for us to do some testing for robustness. Took me an hour or so for the initial test from idea to coding to deployment. Sent it along for their feedback. I should ask them for some money. I’ll track my time. :)
By the way, this mini blog is being implemented in pandoc with front matter holding the title and css filename, and then just using a simple incantation in the terminal to render md to html.
Okay, first official day of December Adventure. It’s Sunday, and I spent much of the day staying warm, visiting Swiss Institute to see their current shows, and the tea shop and Ukrainian Village.
In the evening I decided to spend some time evaluating static site generators and to build one up because I’ve been unhappy with jekyll. For a decade I’ve mostly used jekyll, which has built-in support for GitHub pages. This means it’s easy to host websites on GitHub written in Jekyll. But every few months when I try to make a post on one of my sites (class sites or project sites) I run into a problem and the site won’t build due to dependency hell from some combo of Ruby, gems, or bundler dependencies. I don’t want to use any of these. I’ve put checking out hugo on the back burner for a while, so now felt like a good time to spend a little time with it.
I tried it in 2017, wasn’t immediately noticing it to be much superior to jekyll, and haven’t tried it out since but every time I complain about jekyll someone recommends hugo. So I checked it out! Unfortunately, to make a new site I have to invest time to figuring out directory structure, configuring templating and themes. And like Jekyll, it has many variables, and such to learn and implement. I know it’s probably faster than building my own site from scratch but I got turned off. I didn’t want to learn the hugo way.
So next I fired Eleventy/11ty static site builder, and I check out the starter example on glitch.com. Based on this starter, the structure is pretty clear. The default nunjucks templating can be switched out for liquid templating, which might make it easier to switch. I do have to say I’m not thrilled about npm/node.js here as I fear there could be the typcial npm ecosystem of pulling in a million dependencies, and again dependency / version hell, though npx is to try to prevent this I guess. But based on being a retrogrouch I next pulled up bashblog, a ssg written in pure Bash. It’s fine, though it spends a lot of lines adding in google analytics, disqus and twitter stuff, among other things I do not need or want. I also find the code hard to read since it’s bash. And the default theme is ugly, and the project creator abandoned it, so maybe it wasn’t great?
To make a long story longer after all that I returned to my own custom bash and pandoc-based static site generator, panblog, which I started years ago. I had extracted minimal parts for powering this mini december-adventure site for example, so this was the kick in the pants to complete it, completing a build script, adding in theming, permalinks, index page builder, and auto-adding headers/footers, and rss feed generation. These are all things I already can do, so just need to automate it intelligently.
So I picked up where I had left off working last time I touched the repo. Thankfully, I’m pretty good with documentation and left lots of notes. I decided to make some assumptions, but allow things to be easily changed. There is a config.conf file that holds the sub-directories for: themes, which are just css files; posts, which are markdown files with YYYY-MM-DD-name.md naming scheme; assets, the image assets source directory; templates, a folder holding html templates for pandoc to convert md to html for different kinds of pages; and some variables for holding the site name and url, for example.
My build script creates a site folder if needed. It loops through the posts folder of markdown files, extracting the name and the date separately, via hacky regexes that took me a while to get right. My build script adds the post name and a link to the post page, inside its own directory, to the index page. It then adds the extracted date. It does this in reverse order so the most recent blog posts are at the top of the index. It uses pandoc to convert each post and the index page from markdown to html. I also set up a separate assets folder to hold images. Next steps are to add back in page conversion for non-blog pages, and then to test and automate the rss feed generator. Then to make sure I have some couple good basic and different classless themes. If all goes well, I think this could become my new static site generator for my uni classes, and maybe for my sites in general, and then maybe a good tool for other folks to use as well. It threads the needle between basic markdown to html conversion with straight pandoc on the one end and an overly complex ssg like hugo on the other. I think it’s well on the way.
Added a lot to my panblog static site generator including a comprehensive build script, configs error checking, page rendering system, and documentation. I did a variety of tests and found a few bugs I still have to crack but am in overall good shape.
Much of the day has been consumed by me sitting on a couch with a laptop open and trying to crank out a professional document I have agreed to write, outside of my job but in keeping with the expectations of academia, to support faculty at another institution. It is not due until next Monday but the institution keeps asking me for it, so I’m trying to knock it out. Unfortunately it’s been to the detriment to finishing up squashing bug on panblog.
Anyway…I did get some time to work on it. So far I removed some old build scripts, tested my non-post page generation a bit, then added in some build automation to include opengraph (og:meta) tags, though ran into some issues when trying to populate the opengraph tags.
Next I spent some time researching both metadata and front matter variables
in pandoc, with the goal to automate pulling a og:image url from
frontmatter . I think I found a solution through the
--metadata KEY[=VAL] option or the front matter, and
finally found a good
explanation on stackoverflow, that I think will be useful and I plan
to use that to try to knock out remaining needs for populating
variables. I also see useful info in the extensive man page
man pandoc in the TEMPLATES section and then in
Conditionals, which I think will be useful for testing if an image is
set and then assigning the og:image metadata if it is.
Lastly for panblog, I began to rework gmi.css to an alternate “good defaults” new theme to ship with panblog. First, I checked out 2-color palletes from the Lospec website, and began trying some options, building out a new starter theme fresh.css.
Also, separately, I squashed a bug on Archiving Artist-Run Spaces and added a redirect to my main/portfolio website in the /projects sub-directory in case anyone tries to manually go there directly (instead of to a project directly) so they are re-routed to root, which is the actual portfolio landing page, instead of a 404.
Today I had meetings and taught my Programming Games class. Next week is the end of the semester so today I made a playtesting/coding day and the Learning Assistant and I went around meeting with students to help them squash bugs. We also talked about difficulty in games and tuning your game mechanics, and looked at examples of that across a few genres. The student projects are generally pretty great. I gave them the option of using Pico-8 or Love2d so there are lots of different kinds of projects, from platformers with bizarre mechanics, to race games, to experimental first person adventure stories. The biggest challenges my intro students deal with are writing collision detection for enemies, hazards, pickups, etc. The biggest challenge my advanced students have is reigning in their ambitious ideas that would take months of work and helping them shape a smaller, more doable multi-week project with the time allotted. I don’t want to punish them for being ambitious, so usually I’ll see if they can make just the first level, or a smaller component of their more ambitious game idea. This is especially important since they don’t know to playtest and iterate and would tend to work in their head and solo until they finish, delivering a complete game before ever having another person try it out.
One of the senior students needed some extra credits so I asked him to work on a project this semester to build out a “bartop” arcade cabinet for student games. He made it out of plywood I purchased from the hardware store, and we ordered buttons and a controller from the internet. Then we raided my office stockpile of dumpstered keyboards, mice, monitors, etc that I’ve scavenged over the years, and used a Raspberry Pi from our spring Special Projects in Tiny Computing class. He installed RetroPie and Emulation Station and brought the nearly-finished machine, but we need to install Pico-8 and get EmulationStation to play it. I followed a tutorial of sorts I found on reddit that seemed fairly comprehensive. First I had to escape out of EmulationStation and boot to the console. Hooking up Wifi on campus is a tedious process on campus involving registering the machine, visiting Campus Technology Services and the like. Rather than deal, I just plugged in directly to an ethernet port and got internet the ol’-fashioned way. I updated the computer, which took 15 minutes on the Pi, and then installed Vim so I could edit files. I downloaded some helper scripts from the tutorial onto my own laptop and installed them on one of my server spaces, then used wget in the terminal on the Pi to download and place them in the right places. I need to figure out how overscan works as I can’t see the edge of the screen and thus it’s hard to edit in the terminal. I don’t have a regular GUI installed and didn’t feel like going through the whole rigamorole to get that going, so I did my best to edit and tab around to see what I was typing, but mistakes were made! Eventually, all was well and I got Pico-8 to boot up. I couldn’t quite figure out how the student had configured the controllers and they weren’t working as I expected, so we’ll plan to meet up tomorrow to try to finish up the controller scheme.
Finally, to procrastinate on finishing up the colleague review letter I worked on panblog a bit and continued hacking on a nice starter css theme for blogposts and index pages. I made a little test trying out a modification of a basic theme I started for a class website I taught in the spring. It’s probably a bit “too much” for the out of the box theme but it would be nice to ship a few themes that are basically tiny css files since I feel most static site generators add that extra friction that you need to find themes and configure them when it could be as easy as just changing a single theme name in the front matter of a blogpost or page.
