Sal's Blog

Blog posts about elaborate blogging setups

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:42:47 -0400

Baty just posted this and I just have to follow suit. It’s hilarious and painful how relevant it is to my blog lately:

Comic credit to Rakhim.

pico.sh!

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:39:36 -0400

Wow, pico.sh looks very enticing.

I found it last night after reading Brennan’s post, Free Speech and the IndieWeb, which discusses the reasons he doesn’t use Cloudflare. See also his longer post on this topic.

I have been feeling a little dirty about using Cloudflare for hosting this little indie blog. Plus, Cloudflare frustrated me this week when it wouldn’t update my broken site (my fault for breaking it; Cloudflare’s for not letting me fix it). So Brennan’s post provoked me to look for alternatives. I searched for options that allow deployment of static sites via rsync, and I soon beheld pico.sh.

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PT Mono

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:22:22 -0400

I was succumbing to my Hacker News habit recently and saw this post from Rands: The Title Cards in Blade Runner Are Fucking Amazing.

PT Mono was in the list of fixed-width fonts that made his cut. For some reason it stuck in my brain. Maybe because I hadn’t heard of it.

Later, I found myself perusing macOS’s Font Book app. There, in the relatively small Fixed Width collection of fonts, was none other than PT Mono. Turns out it’s a default font on macOS.

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I published my drafts: lessons learned and steps taken

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 01:57:34 -0400

As I mentioned, I accidentally published all my draft posts. You know, the ones I cheekily listed at the bottom of my ripgrep post. All public and in my RSS feed. Dangit.

What happened

I can’t know for sure, but here’s what I suspect happened.

Sloppiness on my part

When Hugo builds my production site, it puts the files in the public/ subdirectory. I then upload that subdir to Cloudflare Pages with wrangler.

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Another fat woops: I published my drafts

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:31:04 -0400

Adding to the fun of this Hugo migration, I accidentally published all my draft posts this morning.

If you happened to see the actual words of those posts (they might be cached in your feed reader), I realize you now can’t unsee them. My sincerest condolences.

I’ll do a followup post once I figure out what happened and how exactly I fixed it.

Blog-post resiliency

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a good post and tips from Mike Harley: How I make my blog posts more resilient.

Mike recommends self-hosting media. I’ve been back and forth about doing that vs. using something like Cloudinary or Cloudflare. I think Mike makes a good point, and I’ll keep the images in my blog repo.

Mike also puts permalinks in his posts proactively (excuse the accidental alliteration) so they stay consistent across platforms. Smart.

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Finding my draft posts with ripgrep

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:37:15 -0400

You know those moments where you think, dang, computers are so insanely fast now … so why in the world does software still feel slow??

Well ripgrep is the antidote to that feeling. It’s just mind-bogglingly fast. I flippin’ love ripgrep. I use it for so much stuff.

Anyway, today I found a nice snippet that lists all my blog posts that are still in draft status:

rg '^draft( = |: )true' --glob "*.md" --files-with-matches content

The handy bit there is '^draft( = |: )true', which will find both draft = true (TOML syntax) and draft: true (YAML syntax). Since moving to Hugo, my new posts generated with the hugo new content command have TOML frontmatter, but my old stuff has YAML. (I could easily change the default to use YAML instead, but TOML feels fun and whimsical at the moment.)

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Smoke in Portland

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:09:59 -0400

It’s smoky in Portland right now. For the moment, we’ve got the worst AQI of any “major” city in the world.

Here’s what it looks like outside (image from Oregonlive.com):

It’s a drag. My kids both have camps this week that have either been canceled or compromised. Exercising outside is a bad idea. I’m monitoring our indoor AQI with a couple sensors and redistributing air filters around the house.

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An RSS oopsie, props to Pablo at powRSS

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:28:13 -0400

Yesterday I moved my blog to Hugo and, despite my rigorous testing locally and in a staging deployment, I broke my RSS feed in production. Perfect. 🤦‍♂️

The issue was that the Hugo baseURL setting wasn’t being applied properly, so all the post links were pointing at localhost. The scrappy, I’m-in-the-middle-of-dinner fix was to set it manually:

hugo --baseURL "https://sals.place" build

But today I hope to figure out why the baseURL setting in hugo.toml setting wasn’t taking effect.

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Moved the blog from 11ty to Hugo

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:26:18 -0400

What should you do when you’re busy and have been spending too much time on your blog lately? Why, dive head first into a completely unnecessary SSG migration, of course!

I had Hugo on the brain last night for somewhat valid, somewhat flimsy reasons:

I used Hugo in the past and liked it.
11ty’s fast, but Hugo’s wicked fast.
I’ve been writing more Golang code lately.
While I’m fine with JavaScript and enjoy TypeScript, relying on npm feels dirty these days with all the supply-chain attacks. Hugo is a single, batteries-included binary that does not rely on third-party packages.

With these thoughts in mind, I dipped a toe back into the Hugo pond this morning, liked the feel of it, and before long was wild-eyed and neck-deep in migration. It’s now about 3:50 pm, and I think most of the core stuff is working in Hugo.

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Belated welcome to Blaugust

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wasn’t sure I was going to say anything about Blaugust because I’m already posting a lot lately, but why the heck not. So, a belated welcome to Blaugust 2026! From the intro:

If you’re new to blogging, it’s a great opportunity to meet many cool people, get help with starting up your own website, and participate in a cool community project. If you’re a blogging veteran, it’s just the push to dust off the old site and get back into the ring again. Overall, it’s just a nice event that reinvigorates the community and helps folks not just build up a habit of writing but also form connections with other people in the sphere.
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Cursive

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I mentioned that I was going to try following Neal Stephenson’s advice and learn to write in cursive. I stuck with it for almost a whole afternoon.

Is that good?

Practicing proper cursive — in my case, as directed by the Palmer Method — massively slowed down my writing. And the product looked like shit because I was bad at it. Then I realized the Palmer Method opens the rabbit hole of “whole arm movement,” where you use your arm to move the pen rather than your hand. Apparently this can take years of practice to master.

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Re: productivity mirage

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Alex’s post, The Productivity Mirage (HN discussion here):

I remember this legendary software engineer at Facebook. His name is Bob. Bob is a prolific engineer – he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups (among other things). He was also a hackathon legend, delivering hit after hit.

At the time I was a massive productivity nerd. I had a custom Vim setup with my own syntax highlighting and snippets for Hack (Facebook’s dialect of PHP). My elaborate setup involved tmux over mosh with custom hphpd shortcuts and fancy git aliases.
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Re: Bubbles, upvotes, web interlinking

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Brace for metablogging. Sorry / not sorry.

I’m responding to two good posts I found this week:

Brennan’s Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!, which linked me to
Coyote’s Bubbles is a New Way of Recreating Old Problems.

Because I’m a proper smoothbrain, I never realized what the “bubbles” of bubbles.town refer to. The site’s footer currently reads, “Good stuff bubbles up.” As in, the “good” blog posts are made discoverable via upvotes.

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Thoughts in progress: jj and my homelab

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My jj experiment is going well

As mentioned, I’ve been trying jj lately, and I’m beginning to see the light. Or at least some of it. Here are a few key changes I’ve noticed.

{% aside %} Disclaimer: I am mediocre at git and a total beginner at jj. This post captures my thoughts as I learn. It’s not meant to be any sort of guide or advice. {% endaside %}

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