Why now? Why not 5 years ago?
Is this thing on?
May 5, 2024, 8:56 p.m.
Blogs aren't funny anymore
There's an episode of The Simpsons (S9:E15 "The Last Temptation of Krust", for my fellow Simpsons nerds) where Krusty announces his retirement from comedy. His comedy dated to the point of overt racism and vestigial Vaudevillianism, a reporter asks the cutting question "But Krusty, Why now? Why not 20 years ago?" Any time I reach a choice in my life that seems right, but too-slowly arrived at, I chide myself with that quote. After 5+ years of playing with and even working with Django, I wondered why I hadn't just built a basic blog for myself. Just do it. Then iterate from there. But, why now? Why not 5 years ago?
The answer to that question is a bit of a whimper rather than a defense. Distraction, impostor syndrome, good old fashioned laziness, plus the fact that nobody reads or writes blogs anymore, particularly self-made and hosted, all came together to keep me spinning my wheels for far too long.
The Plan
There will be a lot of building the ship as I go. This first post is being written before even being deployed. But why let that stop forward momentum? I am as yet undecided as to how much of this repo I should share with the public. I'm very open to code review or questions from those more senior than myself, but I want make sure my house is in order before I take that risk.
What's new with the blog
What's new? Well, the blog, obviously. But as to specific functionality I've included in this initial deployment heres a short summary. This project is a basic Django application. I considered using Wagtail or Django CMS, but I figured that base Django was built for journalism, so why not run home to momma? I wrote a custom user model, but for it's parked for future development. There are two relatively simple models (Post, Tags) that will allow for MVP functionality of a blog. I'm using a Slug field on the Post model. In using the slug to differentiate routing for each post, I implemented a basic Django Signals receiver. Whenever a Post object is saved to the db, the Signals receiver calls the slugify function as part of some code I deftly stole from a website. Don't ask which one, I was too busy robbing them to take notes. Remember kids: Good engineers copy; Great engineers steal.
After deployment, my next feature pushes will be photo handling, comments, full text search, and the eternal question of "To user or not to user."
Tech Vs Non-Tech Content
As to content and the future of this blog, I dunno. Definitely my forays into ars mechanica, but I know I need an outlet for more than my engineering side. So you're likely to see poetry, translations of weird texts, ravings, movie reviews, reportage (just cause it's fun to say), short fiction, essays, maybe a place for my furtive attempts at visual art (photography and sketching). I likely won't be publishing any manifestos here, but never say never. I have some smatterings of writing here and there that I will eventually pull into this as well, if I can find them all. One of the secondary missions of this blog is to force me to write. I love doing it, but don't practice enough to keep my craft sharp. And there is no better motivation than public humiliation.
Until next time...