I've made a devlog. You can check it out here.
I wanted a place to put updates on my projects and what I have done today. Keeps me accountable and stuff. I could use twitter but nah.
It also serves as a kind of documentation of my projects. Much like a commit log but it feels different then that.
I won't write about what I've done at work or consulting or whatever. Just my projects.
Inspiration
Carmacks .plans. My want to write more.
Tech
Check out the source on github. It's a template that is filled in with a python script. The python script uses a text file formatted in a certain way to generate the index page from the template.
Problems
Tried to make a whole go updater thing using charm, realised this would basically involve me creating a text editor. To hard.
Now I just have a simple shell alias (edl = edit dev log, very vim)
alias edl='cd ~/Documents/dev/devlog/ && vim devlog.txt && git commit -am
"Updated devlog" && git push'
Cron
To update the devlog the script uses an api call to github to get the updated devlog.txt. This could have just pulled the code but this feels more future proof?
It updates once an hour. Maybe a bit much but I'm sure github can handle it.
hosting, apache config
Never really done something like this before1. Normally I would have created a sub domain e.g devlog.mcnally.je. But this time it's under my main website but it's not hosted by django. It's just in the same vhost my django application uses and deployed in /srv/ with an alias.
No django url routing or anything needed, very cool very swag.
It's running under the same user as django is but that's for convenice mainly.
I did also add a link to it in my websites header.
future
Rss, obviously.
I will make a video on why you should have one.
Genericise the devlog - separate the css into a separate file for ease of other people swapping out themes. And make it so you can configure the title and stuff in the python script.
A cute little favicon.
Maaaybe image support. Sounds like to much effort atm so might just hyperlink to them?
A currently working on sorta pinned post. But this could be on my main websites home page.
Devlog as a service? With email updates? Sorta this idea? Custom styling and the like, probably more effort then a weekend project. An api to update would be cool. One to think about...
A graph like the github contributions one? Perhaps on a per tag basis? If you click the tag the image will appear.
Won't do
It has code pre highlighting using backticks. But I'm not going to add syntax highlighting because that would require external JS.
Analytics
Comments - IDK email me or something, voting with emojis like github would be cool, but I don't want no databases.
Search, Ctrl+f exists baby and it's good. I'm not going to paginate2.
Integrate it into this website. I like that it's separate.