Events

I have a list of 6 or 7 short plumbing tasks that I hope will take less than an hour, which is 1/8th the time window the plumbing service provided for the plumber's arrival. We all know how that goes. And at my real job, I'm coordinating a bunch of processes for a biweekly release that, so far, is pretty boring—just how we like it.

In my last post about the Daily Parker's new blog engine, I explained why I built this and what it's for. This post will give you an overview of the app's basic structure; that is, the physical building blocks that make the blog happen.

This is the first in a series of posts I've planned to explain what the Daily Parker blog engine actually is, how it works, and what's coming. I'll start with the most basic question: what the heck is a blog engine and why did I write one from scratch?

Even though I wrote this thing, the new editor interface is so radically different from the old one that it will take getting used to. Also, the new blog engine uses Markdown instead of HTML, which makes writing quicker with a lot less formatting.

I woke this morning to the sound of snow and ice slamming into my bedroom window when this cold front came through:

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Cassie is my 7½-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in March 2021. Quite a lot has changed since then, most notably I wrote a whole new blog engine. (More on that in a moment.)

I feel a little chagrined today as I expect to release the new version of The Daily Parker this evening, and yesterday I failed to write even a cursory post. I blame meetings and a very long dentist appointment (I'm fine; still no cavities; but the new dentist patient intake took a while). I also didn't have any time to read these: Brian Beutler outlines a workable plan for getting rid of the Schutzstaffel Immigration and Customs Enforcement permanently. Yascha Mounk warns that the OAFPOTUS's threats...

(After Dave and Bob got so excited about yesterday's post, I just had to give them more of what they came for. You're welcome.) It turns out, several people use RSS to keep up with The Daily Parker. I hadn't planned to write an RSS feed component before launch, but as I don't want to cut them off, I've reprioritized the feature. Plus, I have a couple more things to do before I can cut over to the new production environment: Implement Real Simple Syndication (RSS); Fix a bug caused by the interaction...

I did not watch the Bears-Packers playoff game last night, but I got real-time updates from my friends and family. You can bet I'm going to watch the highlight reel this afternoon: The Bears won this way all season and delivered yet another thriller Saturday to stay alive in the playoffs. They rallied from a big deficit to beat the Packers 31-27 in their wild-card game at Soldier Field and advanced to host the Rams or defending champion Eagles in the divisional round. It was their first playoff victory...

As I type this, Azure DevOps is banging away at the new blog engine's dev-test pipeline so that I can confirm the last few bits of it are correctly configured. The production environment is up and working, except for icons and RECAPTCHA, which explains the rebuild. Google: your dashboards are really confusing. Creating the production environment took 57 minutes this morning, and creating the production release pipeline (which included setting all the Azure roles properly on things like the database and...