I have an odd fascination with how people get the job done. In that I mean, what their tools look like, what their process is, even their work spaces.
One of the feeds I look forward to reading the most is from Uses This. Their typical interviewee is usually in the tech sector, but there have been several artists, writers, and performers. I’m drawn to their tools of choice, be it Windows, or Mac. The peripherals they use, and the hardware and software they can’t live without. Some list cameras, and even games they play.
Uses This recently featured Kris Howard, and she offered up a lengthy interview. Which I loved of course. In the Who are you, and what do you do? section, I learned in one quick paragraph that she’s working for Amazon in Germany (which she and her partner relocated to in August 2020 from Sydney Australia), that she’s a huge Roald Dahl fan, and that she’s an award-winning knitter. She’s also been blogging for 20+ years at https://www.web-goddess.org. So, naturally, I went down that path and discovered she’s posed naked (along with 5000 other people) for Spencer Tunick. Some people really put it all out there.
But back to the tools. For me, it’s a captivating look into what is typically a non-conversation piece. At work, there’ll be tools that are suggested, and workflows to follow... but that’s about as far as the conversation goes. Someone will ask what my hobbies are, and I’ll say music. But I don’t typically say, “Oh, I love playing around in Logic Pro X or sometimes Bitwig, while other times I’ll grab my PRS SE 24 and plug it into my Fender Mustang amp and then play along to some Blues backing tracks on YouTube”. It’s not a typical every day conversational topic.
By the way, there are some really smart and hella-creative people out there. Call it a side benefit to being glued to the Uses This feed. I’ve learned about various conferences, and podcasts, and hobby projects (one person is a member of of the WesterosCraft project team that is slowly recreating the entire world of Game of Thrones in Minecraft) that I didn’t even have a clue existed.
Heck, one gal is even into group hugging. I mean, how cool is that?
I’m going to set myself a goal for this month: to actually finish something. Whether it’s a song, or a website or a story... I’m going to work on something until I consider it complete.
And then, perhaps, I’ll actually publish that piece.
If it’s a website, that wouldn’t be a big deal; I’ve done several. The one I’m currently contemplating is an overhaul of an existing freelance project. Up until I came onboard, they were using full pages for each section. Meaning that if I made a change on the menu, I had to make that change on each page, as each page had their own menu. So very much in dire need of an overhaul. The tricky part is that the owner has no interest in updating. I don’t think he knows what he’s missing, so my goal, if I go that route, will be to make a site the he likes enough to pay me for it.
I have an embarrassing amount of music clips in my project folders. I can’t even call them unfinished songs, as I think the longest of them comes in a 32 bars or something. Mostly they’re just loops.
Similarly for my writing folder. Mostly short stories, some longer pieces, some are just a sentence or two of an idea. Fleshing them into something I think worth publishing (or, at the very least, posting here) would be a worthwhile goal.
Another option that I considered after writing this (And am editing the next day after originally posting), is fixing up my bass and/or guitar. I have an old hollow body guitar, as well as a bass down in my workshop, both in pieces. The guitar (I’d have to look to see what brand) is a hand-me-down from my dad, a guitar he purchased after remarrying. His second wife played guitar, and he decided to take a stab at it. Thankfully that marriage didn’t last, nor did his desire to learn to play. I’ve had the guitar ever since. I’d taken it apart as a kid (dumbass kid) to paint it, but never got much beyond sanding the neck a bit. I even still have all the parts in a box somewhere.
The bass guitar, which I believe is an old Carvin bass, came into my possession via an old college roommate who skipped out owing rent. He left behind the bass, I guess as some sort of payment. The bass I actually did manage to dismantle and sand down to wood. I’m not sure I have the parts, but of the two, I’d rather have the bass functioning, more so than the guitar.
It might be a tough goal to meet. Much like everything else in my life right now, the desire to accomplish something is there, but the drive is practically nil. I find that during the day, I’m more energized to work on something. However, I’m kinda supposed to be doing actual work during the day. Not screwing around trying to create something I can take a bit of pride in. And by the time the evening rolls around and the evening “chores” have been done (go for a walk, figure out dinner, clean the kitchen, etc.), any energy I had for creative pursuits has faded.
Every week feels more and more like Groundhog Day.
It’s 7:53am on a Saturday morning. I’ve been up since 5:16. Woke up to the sound of the cat barfing. Which seems like an apt simile for 2020.
On March 12th, which was a Thursday, I arrived at work and started my morning routine; put my lunch in the fridge, poured some coffee out of my thermos, setup the laptop, and launched the necessary programs I typically use during the day. Opening my inbox, I saw an email from HR stating the growing concerns about COVID-19. They asked that everyone work from home until the following Friday. I remember thinking “sweet... work from home for a whole week!”
What a naive thought that was.
You know the rest of the story, unless you’ve been under a rock. Businesses, the economy, people’s livelihoods, all took a major hit. Every day I’m thankful that I have a job I can do remotely full-time. A lot of people weren’t as lucky.
Having done full-time remote work before, I had an idea of what to expect. This time, however, there was COVID-19 to also deal with. I work in my basement, and there’s one small window that lets in light. It’s the quintessential man cave. Previously, after working several days in a row and not leaving the house, the wife could tell I was getting a bit squirrelly and would take me to our local pub and meetup with friends and talk over a pint or three. This “mini-reset” always helped and the next couple of weeks would be fine.
I don’t have that outlet now thanks to the pandemic, and the worst of it, it seems like my pub has gone under and will not be opening again. That hurt more than I expected, honestly. The wife and I have been going there for at least 10 years. We’ve become friends with the crew. We’ve introduced our friends to the pub, and several of them became regulars. We were always invited to the “Regulars” Christmas party, where they shut down the bar to patrons and had insane drink specials ($2 for a pint that normally cost $5? I’ll take three please!). It was our “Cheers”.
That’s gone. Nearly everything else is closed, though some restaurants are opening patio seating now. But it’s not the same. I don’t have that outlet to turn to when my brain is slowly turning to tapioca after working too many hours, with the gray walls of my basement and whatever is on the turntable playing in the background (lately, it’s been the classical station on the radio).
So we walk the neighborhood. I go to the grocery store. Clean the house and do yard work. Stuff I used to do because it needed to be done is now stuff I do because I’m bored. Today is Saturday, and my big plan is to sweep and Swiffer our wood floors. Life in the fast lane baby.
The routine is slowly getting to me. Parts of it I very much look forward to; my morning coffee and yogurt with granola (banana on the side, please) at 10:00am. Poker Friday nights with the boys (more on that in a bit). Sitting on our recently completed deck, talking about the day’s highlights and lowlights with the wife over a beer and glass of wine. But the sameness can be maddening all the same. The problem with this forced routine is the lack of spontaneity. Aside from messaging my group of friends and asking who’s wanting to meet up at the pub after work, I’m also missing having lunch with co-workers. Realizing that what I packed just isn’t going to do it, and deciding I want to go out for lunch instead.
Getting on the motorcycle and heading west to wherever is still an option... but stopping in at a local watering hole, or visiting a touristy spot, or seeing some live music isn’t. Riding is still nice, but it’s not the same.
One bright spot is the poker games on Friday nights. I’ve been playing with this same group of guys for many years, some for more than 15. We’ve done White Elephant poker parties, have yearly trips planned that have seen us go from a cabin on Lake Anna, to camping along the Shenandoah River (both in Virginia), to a house along the shores of Lake Winnisekape in New Hampshire, and celebrated birthdays by renting casino equipment, hiring dealers, and dressing up in tuxedos. This is a great group of guys and one of the brighter sparks in the dull existence of my world as of late.
While not the same as getting around the poker table and handling cards and chips, we’ve managed to make it work, via Amazon Chime and pokernow.club. We’ve tried various poker apps with varying degrees of success, but for the past 6 weeks or so, we’ve been using Poker Now, and it’s been great. And the frequency with which we play has increased fourfold. Previously, we would try to get in a game once a month. Now it’s weekly, and occasionally twice a week.
Sometimes I think having the poker game at the end of the week is the only thing keeping me sane.
Getting out in the fresh air, and walking the neighborhood helps too. That can get a bit boring, but recently the wife purchased two different types of trash picker-uppers. One the “stab it” kind, and the other a “grab it” kind. We’ve gotten in the habit of grabbing a trash bag, our trash picker-uppers and collecting trash throughout the neighborhood. Makes the walk a bit more interesting and it make the ‘hood a bit nicer.
Now that the weather is starting to turn, I wonder how the lack of walking will affect the mood. Exercise is important; I know I don’t do near the amount I need to. When it gets cold, it gets harder to convince ourselves to bundle up and go walking.
I’m more than ready for this pandemic to be under control. Completely tired of the selfish and stupid people who want to have their parties and their weddings and not wear masks and live life normally. I get it. I want that too, but the only way we’re going to get there is if we get it under control. Congregating in large groups without masks is not the way to do it.
God dammit, I’m so sick and tired of the people who have their heads buried in the sand.
The last several posts have all referenced my struggles to get i-am.ski up and running in a manner that I was striving for; namely, to be able to update this site using just my iPad Pro in the simplest manner possible. If I had built i-am.ski with Wordpress or CraftCMS, or one of a half-dozen other available CMS frameworks, it would have been a simple matter of loading up a web browser and pointing it to the admin backend and posting from there.
But I went and got all pigheaded about this.
I like trying new things, and as I’ve stated before, wanted to simplify the site as much as possible. Just my words, and not much else. With this in mind, I chose Jekyll. Jekyll doesn’t have a handy admin backend from which I can submit my entries. Each page, whether it’s a post such as this one, or a page like my About page, is written in Markdown. Which is fairly straight forward once you get the hang of it. What I didn’t want was a bloated and confusing admin area that I had to navigate to create just a simple blog post. Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of CMSs have their place; Two of my othersites both use CraftCMS, and I’ve built a couple of other sites on Wordpress. They’re great tools when you have a beefy website to build.
Jekyll is a static site generator, meaning there’s no database that I need to configure. Just flat files, utilizing the Liquid templating language. And after weeks of trial and error, I finally have a workflow I’m comfortable with, with tools I enjoy using (that’s always a big plus), all from my iPad Pro, which is a great piece of technology. Here’s the breakdown:
Hosting:GitHub Pages. Quite frankly, this was the most difficult part of getting i-am.ski up and running. I have a hosting service that I’ve been using for more than 10 years now. But after a lot of research and trial and error (mostly error), I decided to move the i-am.ski domain off of my hosting, and put it on GitHub Pages. The beauty of this is that Jekyll has built-in support for GitHub Pages. When I make changes to the layout, or I submit a new post, GitHub Pages runs the required updates to spit out my changes. Simple to use and, amazingly, free as well.
Version Control:Working Copy. Working Copy is a git client for iOS that does everything you would expect a desktop git client to do. There was a bit of a learning curve, but, like most things, once I started using it often to update the site, it became a lot easier to check-in files to GitHub Pages’s repositories.
Editor:Textastic. I’m forever tweaking the site, and while I (think I) can update the files from Working Copy, Textastic is just a neat little text editor. Again, it’s for iOS, and supports syntax highlighting, SSH and FTP connections, and sports a host of other features.
Writing:iA Writer. Here’s the thing: I like apps and programs that are well designed, and get out of my way. I could, with minimal fuss, update not just the layout and code of i-am.ski with Textastic, but the blog posts as well. Textastic is fully capable of working with Markdown and would have been a viable solution when it came time to deciding what I wanted to use to actually write my posts. Cheaper, too.
I am, however, a sucker for a well-designed app. And I liked the look of iA writer. At $29.99, it’s certainly one of the more expensive apps I’ve purchased. I went back and forth for a couple of weeks before finally pulling the trigger and purchasing it. Quite risky for me, given there’s not even a free trial for iOS. But I’ve not had a single moment of buyer’s remorse since.
So there you have it; GitHub Pages hosts my site. I use Working Copy to checkout and check in the files I want to work on. Textastic for when I want to make changes to the layout or style sheet. And iA Writer for writing the content.
That’s the current state of i-am.ski. Next post, I hope to talk about the current state of SKI, as in, me, myself, and I. Stay tuned.
After ignoring the site (once again) for awhile, I took another stab at getting my personal domain hooked up with the Custom Domain feature that’s available in Github Pages. I think I finally, finally cracked it, and now I’m publishing posts from my iPad, to Github Pages, using Jekyll as my CMS, Working Copy for version control, and iA Writer to actually write the posts. Huzzah!
The key, missing bit in having people who visit i-am.ski was setting the A records for my domain on my hosting provider. I’d set the CNAME record as described in the Github Pages docs, but I had completely missed the step where it described how to setup the ALIAS, ANAME, or A record. I thankfully found a medium.com article that outlined the 2 key steps needed. Once I read through that, everything clicked into place.
Now I have no excuse to write more often. Everything is working smoothly.
It's finally starting to come back together. Somehow I managed to wrap my brain around the whole update-the-site-from-the-iPad concept, and I seem to be back to posting to this blog like normal. Well, almost normal. There's still a few minor issues to iron out as I see it:
Fix the templates so I'm as close to the original Ghost theme I had going (there was a ton of CSS I wasn't using, started with a different base theme this time)
Work on integrating iA Writer (strictly for aesthetic purposes.)
Categories! Need to create or import the current category template pages.
And I'm sure there's more to do that I'll think of down the road.
But holy hell, I'm finally updating my site from the iPad. That's pretty amazing in my book. This little iPad Pro 11" is a pretty amazing little machine, and being able to utilize even more of its awesomeness it just...well, awesome.
Once again, testing to see if I can figure out an ipad solution. I think I have several "testing" posts now floating around in the ether. Not sure where they disappeared to.
Oh well. Take 424235!
edit
Whoa. Holy crap, did I actually get this working? Did I find a solution that actually works?
If I smoked, I'd go have a cigarette. This has been a long process in getting this all setup. I'd rather have used iA Writer, and that's strictly because it's just a more elegant program for writing, but honestly, right now, Textastic is bombastic.
I'll worry about iA Writer later. For now, let's get comfortable with Textastic and Working Copy.
After a failed update and a couple of months of apathy, I'm finally back to having my site looking how I want. Simple and clean is the name of the game here.
The fallout took place when trying to update Ghost and basically things did not go well. I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot (again!) after that first go round, so I figured I'd revisit later. Later became days, which turned into weeks... before I knew it, five months had gone by and I was still looking at the "I broke it again" html page I'd thrown up.
I decided to move on from Ghost, and opted instead for Jekyll, a static site generator. The big benefit here is there's no need for a database. No database means less maintenance, less overhead, fewer options for script kiddies to try to take over my site (who'd want to??). It also uses Markdown which is something I've been wanting to get more familiar with.
I'm also going to collect all my previous posts (at least those that I can find) and import them here. There are posts from Wordpress and Blogger that date back quite some years. I plan on dating them when they were originally posted, so there will be posts back from the early 2000's. I won't be posting items that were simple one liners ("It's snowing!" for example) and would've been better off as tweets.
Now on to the fun of importing entries and ripping out all the extraneous markup that some of these tools add. Joy.
I think the end goal that I have in mind for this website — aside from the obviousness of blogging — is to be able to update from wherever I am. As I’ve switched to Jekyll, this isn’t as easy a task to accomplish, as say, something built on Wordpress, or even Grav. Both of those CMS’s have Admin areas that you load up in a browser to compose your pages in. As far as I know there’s no admin plugin available for Jekyll. Not that I’ve looked that hard.
I’m intending to write most my posts on my iPad. I know there are various Markdown editors available, but currently I’m using the iOS version of Scrivener. I’ve setup a project where I’ll write my posts, that is currently synced to Dropbox. Currently I’m using iA Writer, and will hopefully get this to sync with Dropbox, or similar. This isn’t something that’ll be completely fool proof anytime soon. After all, I’m quite the fool and excel and breaking stuff. I’ve also finally uploaded the site to the domain, so I’m not just talking to myself on my local machine. Now I’m talking to myself in the great wide open digital domain.
There are still a few things to button up before I’m completely happy:
Being able to creat a post and seamlessly upload it to i-am.ski
I haven’t tested how images will look yet
Still need to setup RSS Feeds (not that I’m at all popular, but you never know and it’d be nice to have them setup in advance. Besides, once they’re in place, they’re low-maintenance)
Fix the icon in the footer
Get descriptions for each category in place
Code refactoring; I suspect there’s a lot of unused CSS that I could remove
Otherwise, I feel pretty good about the state of the site. Good enough to currently show it to the public at least. The list above can be worked on in my spare time.
I'm not having as much luck as I'd hope getting an iPad-only solution to posting entries here. I can't get my Dropbox to sync after following Tyler Hall's entry. I know it's possible...but maybe not possible with my host, which is currently a VPS on Dreamhost. I'm sure it is... I've just not been smart enough to figure it out as of yet.
Another option which I think I'll explore is utilizing Github Pages, and point the i-am.ski domain there. Assuming I can get it working (Github Pages has built-in support for Jekyll right out of the box), there will be the added benefit of becoming more comfortable with Git. I use Git daily at work, and while I'm not near as gun-shy as I used to be, if anything goes awry and I need to use some other git commands, then I tend to get a bit nervous. Particularly when I end up having merge conflicts, or similar issues.
Otherwise, isolation goes on. Given the time I've been spending in my basement where my home office is, I've been wondering how hard it'd be to add another window. Probably more money than I want to spend on this house.