Naming Things is Hard

Proof of life update

2025-06-09T15:32:45Z

Anyways, hello, if you’re still out there in feed-reader land.

It’s been quiet here but I think maybe I finally have an idea or two of what to actually, like, do, here. Which could be a lot of fun if you’re into whatever my dumb idea of fun is.

In the meantime I am—for varying degrees of “am”—out there other places still, which you can find here. Feel free to shout at me if you like.

Mattrbld would like to enter the static site CMS editor chat

2025-02-07T21:07:42Z

Okay so I swear to the skies this isn’t supposed to be a static site content management system app review blog, but, BUT: I think you have to check out Mattrbld, which has very quickly become my new favorite blog editor.

Full disclosure: I’m still pretty new to it, and it’s still a pretty new app itself, having just gone 1.0 recently, but there’s a lot to love here.

I’ve been…not enthusiastic about Decap, the cms/editor I’ve been using, for a bit now, mostly because it’s just kind of ugly. The UI just doesn’t feel great, it’s not terribly mobile friendly, and I just don’t love it, you know? It’s not something that makes me want to pop open a window and start blogging about stuff, at a time when I’m actively interested in blogging more. It works, it gets the job done! And there’s still plenty to appreciate about it, I think. But I’ve been wondering out loud recently if maybe there wasn’t a better way.

And then I swear like a week later I learned about Mattrbld, and once I took it for a spin and saw what it was doing, I became rather enamored.

So the shtick here is that instead of directly “installing” it to your repo, like you do with Decap, you run Mattrbld through a dedicated instance that runs as a PWA in your browser. You connect it up to your repo (or repos, more on that shortly), and from there you can do all your config directly within the app itself. It stores all your settings, including schemas and collection configurations, in a dedicated dot-folder in your repo; it can even collect schema info directly from existing content, which feels kind of disturbingly magical, to be honest.

The cool thing, or one of the cool things, here, is you can connect your PWA usage of Mattrbld to multiple repos, each with their own separate configs—so now I have my three blogs all set up within it, which means I can do all my blogging from a single platform. And then because all the repo-specific info is stored in that dot folder in each repo, you can load it up on multiple devices pretty easily.

And, what’s maybe most important here, is the interface feels nice. I am having more fun typing up blog posts here than I was in Decap (or even in Obsidian, knowing I’d eventually have to copy-paste it all into Decap to do it). There’s a reduction of friction here that makes the whole experience feel more like a classic CMS set-up than I’ve experienced yet, for my limited needs.

One of the more interesting gotchas that’s worth noting is that you’re technically working with content in your browser, in your local storage, which is then sync’ed up on demand with the remote repo. It’s maybe the one mental hurdle I’m still working on leaping here, not that it’s a particularly challenging one; mostly affects how I work with drafts, knowing both I need to figure out how to go tell Netlify to ignore my drafts-only syncs so I’m not running needless builds, and also reminding myself I do need to hit that sync button if I want to type up a draft on my computer and publish it later on my phone.

There’s more I should say or could say here, stuff I’m still taking note of and trying to work out for myself, but right now I’m mostly just excited to just go ahead and hit publish on this post and let it fly. Because I just…wrote it in Mattrbld. And now I can just…publish it. It’s almost…fun!…to blog!…

Static site content management systems...er, I mean, system

2024-10-17T20:44:46Z

When I last wrote about this, there were two really good options for what I was looking for. Now there's only one, as Static CMS has been discontinued.

I'm bummed out about this, because Static CMS continued to have the better overall interface, and while I've tamed the Decap CMS interface a bit via the kind of thing you find when you dig through the issue queue, it's still not quite as good. Which, again, is a bummer.

But! Not the end of the world. I'm using Decap over on another blog of mine that I've been starting up recently, and it does work. I do wish the mobile interface kicked more butt, even with the hack styles implemented; it does seem like there's active work on the UI going on now, which is great. I'm holding on to see what's coming.

Web Dev Feeds

2024-03-22T12:01:15Z

Look, I'm not about to start actually reading 1000 feeds, but, like, it's kind of fun to have it in the feed reader, as a source of pleasant professional distraction.

Link

Web Dev Feeds

Static site content management systems

2024-03-20T14:28:39Z

I've got two blogs hosted on Netlify using 11ty-based blogging systems—this one, which I generally brewed up myself using 11ty, and then my book blog site, which I recently revamped using 11ty-base-blog.

I don't update either enough, which is fine, I'm busy, but when I do, it sure is nice to have an interface to my content that doesn't require me to load up my code editor and directly interact with my files. To that end I use two separate versions of something that, once upon a time, was called Netlify CMS; for this site I use Static CMS, which forked off Netlify CMS a while back when it looked like Netlify CMS was dying on the vine, and for the book blog site, which I set back up sometime last year, I use Decap CMS, which is what Netlify CMS officially “became" when Netlify decided to officially not do it anymore.

What's worth noting off the top is that neither of these “CMS” options involve a database: they're both essentially interfaces that allow web-based editing of markdown files hosted in the site's git repo which in turn is published and hosted through Netlify (or, presumably, possibly, some parallel or similar system). I'm not sure how well this actually would work for teams collaborating on a site, or if it meets the needs of non-technical users who have a technical person handling site set-up but don't themselves require or possess technical know-how; I do not it makes it much easier for me to let the “content” and “nerdy code detail” sides of my brain drift from each other in time and space.

Set-up for both systems is fairly similar—there's an admin folder that needs to be published as part of the site deploy along with a settings or configuration file to gives the interface knowledge about the structure of the site-specific content files; all this feeds into a JavaScript-based interface. Authentication, at least for me, is through Netlify Identity. Honestly I'm pretty much at “just follow the tutorials and docs” levels of understanding here and I got them doing basically what I bare-minimum need them to do; it's not too hard, for sufficiently flexible views of what “too hard” might mean for you.

That said recently I realized that neither interface has let me know just how out of date my current versions were; for either site I was running 2 to 3 major versions behind. Luckily updating mostly meant pointing the scripts at the new versions and doing some minor under-the-hood cleanup, relatively minor because I'm not doing anything too crazy with either site. Fairly painless upgrades, in the end.

And, wow, what a difference it makes, particularly on the Static CMS side. The thing I'd liked more about Decap CMS was that it offered an editorial workflow system—the ability to naturally save content in draft form before hitting publish. (I had a “draft” flag on posts already so I could do this, but it's nice to have that baked into the system.) When I ran the upgrades I was fairly convinced I was going to wind up moving both sites to the same system, but now I've got this site running the newest (I think, unless there's already a new version I'm not aware of) Static CMS version, and now it too has an editorial workflow system in place. Plus the overall interface has gone through a huge upgrade; there's a dark mode and just a general polish that, last I checked, Decap CMS doesn't quite have yet. It's real impressive, and if I had to recommend one or the other, I would probably go with Static CMS.

At least, that's what I'd go with today. Decap CMS does seem to better integrate with Netlify's deploy preview system, so draft posts actually get fullly-previewable links on live “copies” of the site, which is really nice; maybe that's avaialble in Static CMS yet and I haven't figured it out yet. And of course at least from a total outsider view it seems like maybe these systems running in parallel are sort of nudging each other along, and I'll be curious to see what comes next from either side. At least for now I'll take advantage of the fact that I've got too many blogs (and not enough time for any of them) as a chance to keep an eye on both sides of the fence to see what happens.

Web CompOH!nents

2024-01-25T22:10:03Z

I've been thinking about web components and I haven't been understanding web components and then today I listened to The Vanilla JS Podcast's “The elevator pitch for web components” episode and then I got several links deep into the related blog post and now I'm staring at a mildly custom little thing I need to insert into a specific point in one page in a CMS and I'm like, oh, wait, wait, maybe I don't have to sit here manually editing and reloading this page in the CMS over and over again to get this to work. Maybe I can web componentize this, work on the JS interactivity part separately, and just reload the related page until its working the way I expect. Or am I thinking about this the wrong way, still? Do I have time to figure it out? Let's find out!

Bug Watching Considered Benficial?

2023-09-22T17:51:09Z

Did you know you can kind of watch browsers be developed? It's true! Like once upon a time I subscribed to this "bug" against Firefox in Mozilla's Bugzilla site and ever since then I've been getting notification bits in my inbox about this dependency or that blocked issue as they've trickled out and it's just enough to remind me that this new feature I'm really interested in is definitely being worked on and is certainly coming, someday, probably. It's kind of cool.

You can also of course file bugs against browsers. Which is how I know that this incredibly weird and obscure bug I filed against Safari…does not appear to be definitely being worked on. But hey! Maybe someday!

Experimental Dark Mode

2023-05-26T19:53:10Z

Hi. I've added a dark mode toggle. It's wildly underthought and highly experimental. Which is pretty much the entire M.O. of this site, anyway, so, you know. Anyway, you can click that button down below and maybe it'll work and not be too horrible?

Clean-up, clean-up, everybody does their share

2023-05-26T15:05:42Z

I'm working on some clean-up here, fixing some things and rearranging some furniture that's been bothering me for a while. To that end I suspect lots of links are going to break and the RSS feed is going to probably vomit all over the place for a bit. I apologize in advance. Should be a one-time thing. (I hope.)

Visual Studio Storm

2023-03-22T13:20:54Z

Sometime late in 2022 I made the switch from PhpStorm to Visual Studio Code. Now I think I'm switching at least partially back. Maybe!

I really had no interest in making the switch in the first place, but PhpStorm, for whatever reason, was starting to act like a mess, crashing way more than is ideal. I kept updating the app and hoping it would fix whatever problems were plaguing me but then it kept seeming to get worse. Not quite to the point of unusability, but to the point of, between the crashes and a light desire to maybe not have to pay money for my code editor, wondering if maybe it wasn't time to jump off that ship.

So I've been trying to use VS Code since, and I do generally like it, once I got up and running with it. But it also annoys me in equal measure. Trying to get my keyboard shortcuts matched up has been a never-ending battle—I kind of hate the way it works in Code, the fact that it feels like I could get everything to work the way I know it worked in the previous editor, if only I were willing to spend all my time customizing my shortcuts.

I'm also growing less interested in how much it feels like I need to customize the editor to be the editor I need the editor to be. As much as I get the experience of having this base code editor which you can then plugin your way into being whatever it is you want it to be, I'm also kind of tired of feeling like I'm building my own code editor on the fly every time I open it up and discover this one other thing that doesn't quite work the way I need it to.

Like…PHP support is kind of a hot mess, isn't it? It's frustrating that some of the basic formatting stuff I feel like I need access to is depending on community plugins that are basically unsupported at this point. As much as I want to be cheap, there's also something to be said for giving the right someone some money, so then at least when something doesn't work right, I have some skin in the game when I feel like I have complaints to voice.

The final straw's been when—I work in Drupal 7 still, a lot, and so I do a lot of template structured stuff; <?php if ($foo): ?> kind of stuff. And for some reason formatting all those *.tpl.php files has become the absolute bane of my existence. Nothing is quite working to the point where the style I had going into the file is the style I have going out of the file; indents are off and nesting levels are off and all sorts of little things are just going “I dunno, let's try it like this!" The tipping point's been when I think I finally got everything working right, except for whatever reason the editor, when I try to format the file, is sticking a space between the closing parenthesis and the colon up there in the alternate control structure syntax. I got as far as the editor putting the space in there, but then telling me it shouldn't be there, at which point I almost Ron Swanson'ed my laptop into the trash bin.

I know there's going to be a certain amount of churn when it comes to getting a new environment up and running, but at some point when you realize you're thinking you might have to learn how to script the browser yourself to do a basic task that just kind of worked somewhere else, maybe this isn't the best use of one's time. So I'm hoping reinstalling PhpStorm gets me back and running without having to think about this stuff anymore. Since I made the switch my organization upgrades me to an Apple silicon MacBook, and I'm hoping against hope maybe the new machine will handle better whatever the older machine couldn't. I'm also debating just moving my main Drupal project back into PhpStorm and leaving everything else back in VS Code, because there's definitely things I like about VS Code that PhpStorm doesn't seem to offer, but then also the thought of running two code editors and trying to keep my keyboard shortcuts in sync feels like a recipe for nightmares, too.

Long story short: I don't know! I'm annoyed.