Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written, interesting practice material, and no easy way to access it!” So I went out of my way to create such a way, and me and my language skills have been profiting off of it ever since. A very small website, for a very specific need, just leaves a delightful aftertaste in the mouth.

Art of the dotflag -- `.nojekyll`, `.gitkeep` and their ilk

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I’ve been ~~procrastinating~~ playing the long game by getting some nice workflows set up for my TIL content repository and its associated website (cf Context, below). If all goes well, by the time I hit :wq on this TIL, it should invisibly trigger 2 Git commits, a Hugo build, and then appear on the site fully-birthed.

One of the more interesting patterns I noticed was the .nojekyll empty file which I had to build to get GH Pages to stop tussling with my Hugo Action for turf. .nojekyll is technically a dotfile, but it doesn’t actually contain any content - its mere existence is enough to change behavior. And that makes their existence a really interesting design affordance offered to us developers by the filesystems we use every day but rarely think about.

Github-Actions on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Lessons learned from 6 months of operating a teensy-tiny news archive

Art of the dotflag -- `.nojekyll`, `.gitkeep` and their ilk