The blog keeps on keeping on, though I see in recent posting, there’s a lot of looking back, and one (well this one) can start worrying about being seen as too “back in the day” mindset. Time to flip the scopes (well there is a lingering draft of one more retro post).
The old CogDogBlog cycled right past it’s 18th birthday. Hey, technically it’s old enough to be considered an adult in many jurisdictions.
The daily photos happen, but with more sputters. Minor splot tinkering and use happens, but heck they have got some age spots on them. The workload is full, with community engagement projects with OE Global, support for BCcampus simmering in the H5P Kitchen and also at the OpenETC. Some occasional update work via JIBC for the Corrections Leadership site. Less about these seem to get blogged (as most of them in the work end up involving a fair bit of blog publishing elsewhere.
The excuse pile can be heaped upon easily.
Plus, there’s new tasks at home, having moved to a 16 acre rural property. Like operating a tractor.
And the ongoing question of what does pandemic emergence look like, is there a clear line of being on the other side, or the slow fade into the something else.
All of this is blabber as I am waiting for that spark of an idea that opens a new creative door in the tech work. That thing I have been lucky to latch on to or bump into or just accidentally fall into that generates some new ideas. The thing I know is that I never find it when I am looking for it. The universe just seems to drop it according to some other system’s design than my own.
One possible glimpse of a spark comes from Paul Hibbitts, whose work in using grav as a content publishing system has been for a long time “something I should find time to explore” but lately in his sharing channel of the OpenETC Mattermost I have been intrigued at his use of docsify as a static web publishing platform that needs no special scripts or geeky server set up to create web content from markdown content. See his docsify starter kits which are all set up to clone, copy, and repurpose, all hosted in Github.
My idea comes from a realization that the sprawling documentation I have written for my GitHub hosted WordPress themes and plugins are lost on long ReadMes that NoOneLikelyReads (e.g. SPLOTbox setup). It seems like creating documentation in the more structured format of docsify (e.g. sections with a table of contents) would be better. And then I asked Paul in Mattermost chat if it was conceivable to combine all ym documentation into one docsify. Not only did he answer but he even created an example.
I’m getting glimmers because docsify (or perhaps it’s also i the GitHub flavor of markdown) has a means to embed media, but even more, a way to include content from external files (and cracking open a dusty doorway labeled “transclusion”).
Until I actually do something, I am writing here maybe to tie me to follow through.
The other spark of an idea that I have no clue where I might use it came from the great snippets (oh which I might understand 20% of the tech) I find in the RSS Feed of my photo geek friend Roland Tanglao’s blog, that led me to a tweet and link reading:
Again, I have no data driven project, but the idea of being able to create a static web site, hosted in GitHub, that could poll for and present visualizations, is something I’d like to keep rumbling around in the gray matter.
The “new” tech things do not just pop and an announce themselves, but there are things I try to do to create the potential to even get a whiff of them.
What’s not new in the tech field is looking for the new. Hello to the next new, whatever it is. How does it work for others?
Image Credit:
Congrats on reaching the milestone of 18 years!