_aesthetics

Going to do some performative self-awareness here. Many people fall victim to the siren song of fiddling with the configs and never writing anything down. I have avoided that fate by using simple tools. I would normally balk at the idea of writing about tools, but I am setting up a new laptop this evening and this is also a nice exercise to verify I’ve taken all the little required steps to maintain my regular writing workflow.

• Markdown converted to $\texttt{.html}$ with pandoc. That is about 90% of it.

• Warm-reload while I’m working on things. I considered a true hot-reload, but that involved too much work, $\texttt{ctrl+r}$ is good enough.

#! /bin/bash
# fswatch is just cross-platform inotifywait: https://github.com/emcrisostomo/fswatch
fswatch ./_pages/ | while read fp _ _; do
   htmlfp=`(echo ${fp} | sed 's/.md$/.html/' | sed 's/_pages/pages/')`
   printf "regenerating :: %s => %s \n" ${fp} ${htmlfp}
   pandoc --quiet --listings --mathml --highlight tango --template ./pages/templates/template.html \
        -s -t html5 $fp -o $htmlfp   
done

• The CSS template is a little fancy. It’s mostly the standard pandoc template with a few adjustments. Some readers may notice that I shamelessly copied the style of the margin notes from Concrete Math.

 body > blockquote {
      width: 350px;
      border-left: 1px solid #202020; /* Adjust the color as needed */
      padding-left: 0.5rem;
      margin-left: 5rem; /* Adjust margin for spacing */
      margin-top, margin-bottom: 1rem; /* Adjust margin for spacing */
      font-style: italic;
      color: #000000;
      float: right;
      font-size: 16px;
}

• Hosting is CloudFront + S3 + Route53. It costs $0.52 a month. My CI is an alias of the below.

sh ./ci/build.sh &&\ aws s3 sync ./pages \
s3://given-s3-billing-vulns-lets-be-safe-about-the-bucket-name \
--profile blog-release 

• I don’t really need git, but choose to push to (private) GitHub repository once in a while for safety/convenience.

• Ah, last thing. I do depend on the Sublime Spell-Checker. I have to use that to save some credibility, lest I whiff on words I should have committed to memory 20 years ago.