Engine-Swapping My Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on my blog (4 years)! If it looks shorter from my post timeline, that’s because I’ve since backdated some posts for projects I completed in the interim (e-reader, car repairs, NAS, etc.). I’m nearing the end of my PhD as I type this, and the past 4 years were spent mainly grinding research and getting really invested in climbing – I’m now a senior trip leader in rock climbing for Outdoor Recreation Georgia Tech, which might warrant its own blog post. But something I certainly haven’t done in that time is post on this blog, probably because I just don’t really like Emacs any more.

I’ve referenced in my first not-backdated post that I decided to manage this site through Emacs org-mode as a way to stay up-to-date with a text editor. Well, I’ve realized this was a terrible decision for many reasons:

1. I don’t particularly care to be really good at using a terminal-based text editor
2. Because of (1) and other factors, I’m not very good at Emacs
3. Following on (2), the effort required to make a post was then obviously more than I wanted to spend

Thus, I simply didn’t post. You can see the signs in my last post of it being a massive pain; I even foreshadowed this change 4 years in advance!

I caved and switched everything to Jekyll. I’ve started taking most of my school and personal notes in Obsidian, so a Markdown-based blog will greatly lower the barrier to posting for me – actually eliminating reasons (1), (2), and (3) for why I haven’t been. I’m not actually making this post a tutorial, since if you were a rational person, you’d likely just start your blog using Jekyll from the beginning and avoid this hassle. The process was actually a good HTML/CSS refresher for me though, since modularizing everything into Jekyll’s categories, creating a _layouts/default.html page template with various _includes, etc. forced me to revisit all the design choices I had made 5 years ago when I started this blog and update them all. I wanted to preserve the theme, though, which required rewriting most of the CSS to switch from org-mode HTML element syntax to Jekyll / Liquid / Rouge’s. All that effort, and the difference is (nearly) unnoticeable!

I don’t necessarily regret starting with Emacs, but I’ve dialed in how I interact with computers more and realized it just wasn’t for me. Hopefully the future of this blog is one with more posts now that I have one less reason not to. This whole process reminded me of a pretty good YouTube video where Ronald Finger modernizes the engine in his Datsun 280Z: keeping the same engine block but upgrading from a distributor cap to individual coil packs, a bad predecessor of electronic fuel injection to a modern form, drive-by-wire, and a modern ECU. I’ve linked it below, it’s a good watch.

Some future work will be integrating this blog into my Obsidian vault; currently, I’m writing and editing these posts in VSCode – which is fine, but straight from my vault to Github Pages would be the most streamlined workflow for me.