CodeReflections

Back in March of 1991, I started a new job as a software developer for a very small company. From day one, I knew that Perl was an essential tool which I needed for the job. However, I needed Perl to run on an Altos Unix system which was missing the C compiler, so this was easier said than done! It turned out to be an interesting bootstrapping challenge to solve using free software, though it did require jumping through a few hoops.

[I started working on this blog post back in September, but I had to set it aside for months due to other priorities and distractions. Now it's nearly Christmas!! Oh well.]

When I created this blog, I wanted to use one Git repository for the Markdown source files and a separate Git repository for the files generated by Zola, the static site generator that I was using. This is harder than it sounds, because Zola automatically deletes the entire output directory at the start of its build process, including the public/.git file that identifies the public output directory as a Git submodule. Read on for the story of how I came up with a solution for this chicken-and-egg problem...

Well, it's been over a month again since my last post. July was a busy month again, especially because I was a speaker at The Perl and Raku Conference 2023 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The recording of my Making Sense of Regular Expressions talk is on YouTube. More on that later -- this post is about wrapping up the origin story of this blog, although there's still a bit more to come...

I started working on formatting ChatGPT conversations in my last post, but along the way, I also stumbled across another problem with the website design. The DeepThought theme comes with a dark mode button, but I found that clicking it turned my avatar into some weird inverse color image. I decided to take a detour to research this issue...

Oops! It's been over a month since my last post about fine-tuning the website theme. I've been expecting this from the start, that sooner or later I'd fall behind on making new blog posts because of being busy and distracted by everyday life. Oh well. (I'll try not to fall so far behind again, but I'm sure it will happen again, probably sooner than later!)

I've also been procrastinating on this post because formatting these ChatGPT conversations is a rather tedious process. That procrastination contributed to the long delay since my last post. Actually, figuring out how to format ChatGPT conversations is the topic of this post...

Continuing my endless conversation with ChatGPT, in my last post, I decided to use Zola's DeepThought theme for this blog. I figured out how to emulate WordPress-style URLs, but there were still a number of other details I needed to iron out. Decisions, decisions...

Continuing the conversation with ChatGPT, in my last post, I decided to use Remark42 as the comment system for this blog. Next, I need to choose a website theme to use for the blog with the Zola static site generator.

My lengthy conversation with ChatGPT continues! In yesterday's post, I decided to use Zola as the blogging platform. Now I have to figure out how to integrate a comment system into a static site generator...

After my initial exploration of blogging platforms and finding a VPS hosting provider, I needed to decide which blogging platform to use. ChatGPT continued to assist with the decision-making process.

Yesterday's post didn't finish the story of selecting a blogging platform, because I diverted to a side quest of finding a VPS hosting provider to be able to implement a comment system. I'll finish the story of the blogging platform in tomorrow's post.