My First Markdown Blog Post

It's not a particularly momentous occasion, but I have made enough progress on my Markdown parser script to be able to produce a simple HTML page. I've been learning a bit along the way. I've never worked in Ruby before, and now I know the basic syntax of it. I am far from an expert, and I find myself looking things up frequently, but now I know that the language really is quite reader-friendly. I have also come to appreciate the "syntactic sugar" that the language provides. There are some easy ways to do simple tasks that save just a few keystrokes, but it does make the whole language feel quite comfortable to work in.

I have more work to do. I need to get it to support lists, and I want to do an entire rewrite to make it clean and presentable. Then, I want to make it part of an automated script that will build my .md files into familiar blog HTML posts, and even update the XML feed at the same time!

Other stuff

Build/Deploy

While working on the Markdown parser, I was also working on moving my hosting to another source yet again. This time, I am no longer using the same backend software that I had been, so I had to rethink how I published my webpages. My templates no longer render in real-time, so I managed to create a little build script for my website that pre-renders all the templating before uploading the website to the new source.

It's fairly simple, but it was new to me and that was a source of pride. I got to get hands on with bash, Github Actions, and some other command line tools to get the code into production. I have previously only done anything like this in a workplace environment, where there were more guardrails and explicit requirements to follow. It was freeing and exciting to follow my own ideas and motivation to get this done.

Life things

I just got back from TooManyGames this past weekend, and it was a good time. I spent most of the weekend walking the dealers, playing some mahjong, and throwing myself at various indie and arcade games. Someday I'll get through the Advanced stages on the classic arcade Monkey Ball. I got all the way to level 30 and then hit the usual wall that that stage provides.

Another nice devleopment from that weekend was that I entered, and won(!) the Splatoon 3 tournament that was put on. Thanks to Damp, Missingno, and dendy crew for being my teammates!

Looking forward

My intent is to write many more blog posts once I get this Markdown workflow fully done. I can already feel how much easier this will be to write. Markdown is much less cumbersome to write than HTML.

I am working to be more involved in my local and social lives, and really put myself out there more. The website is one of several avenues for doing that.