This is my personal blog. All entries are listed below, most recent first.
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Just serviced the machine that acts as my server, for this site and some other stuff. Had a RAID1 disk fail, and there was other stuff that needed to happen anyway. The RAID array is recovering now so I guess stuff will probably be slow while that happens. Not that it really matters that much.
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I've written some more fiction. If you like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and married lesbians, then I present, Silksteel Anniversary.
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Still yearning for Guix System... Reproducible systems 🥺 I want to be able to take root out of my backup sets and just back up my files and the configuration...
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I've thought recently about malware, especially malicious kernel modules. Obviously, to load a malicious kernel module, you have to already be root, so the system is already pretty thoroughly compromised by that point, but a module can potentially make it much harder to detect the compromise so it's definitely useful to make them harder to load.
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The TARDIS is meant to be a pocket dimension. But, if it weren't, if it were actually physically a larger space on the inside... What does general relativity tell us?
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reminder that social networks can just lie
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I renewed my OpenPGP keys; in fact, I set them to never expire. Seems pointless when the keys can be revoked anyway and renewing them doesn't actually change the key material itself.
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I've published another new story, Ia's Devotion. Predictably for me, this is a story about trans girls and goddesses (and, in this case, love).
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I bought TRPL.
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The Rust Programming Language, 2nd Edition is $50...
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There are a number of ways to style SQL code, varying in capitalization, indentation, etc. and frequently the style any given programmer, group, or project uses is very different from the style of their application code. Here's my typical style, as it is nowadays.
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When people say Why should we be doing X when Y problem exists?
I just get confused, because... we have multiple people who can be working on multiple different things at once. That's one of the benefits of having a society.
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sometimes I see people talking about 1st person or 3rd person writing being "better"
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Pragmatic brain: Shaving my legs is an annoying, fiddly, time-consuming process that often results in cutting myself and creates chances of infection and ingrown hairs.
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I've published three more pieces of my own fiction here on my own site. Two of them are repatriated from elsewhere, and one is brand new.
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I explained the GNU project to a non-computer-toucher friend as the following two facts:
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As we here in the US continue careening through an era of chaos and hope not to see a less-bungled repeat of the recent attempts to seize dictatorial power, let's remember one thing: Caesar came from the left, after Sulla came from the right. Keep an eye on the people you think are on your own side too.
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I slowly begin to develop a stronger and stronger urge to declare outright war on short-form platforms and refuse to use anything with a hard character cap.
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One of the most fundamental lessons we seem to keep re-learning is that one of the most important factors in protecting systems from being hijacked is the separation of data, which could be from untrustworthy sources, from control information, which has the power to make the system do specific things.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day has a working RSS feed! It's also a podcast, apparently, but the actual word-of-the-day text entries show up perfectly in a feed reader.
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Maybe it's paranoid but I have a habit of never writing loop tests with equals or not-equals the last value, I always write while
or i is greater than zerountil
. Because, like, what if the loop overshoots? Or something? What?n is less than or equal to x
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I may have accidentally written a CSS stylesheet for U.S. House roll call vote XML.
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This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
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Earlier today I spent a bit of time rediscovering how you can frequently take XML data and make it palatable in a Web browser with no more than a couple dozen lines of CSS. Not the most accessible unfortunately, but for visual rendering ::before/::after and the content property are pretty powerful. And of course if you need more power and better accessibility there's always XSLT. And if you use fragment references in your <?xml-stylesheet?> declaration you can manage this with no external resource dependencies.
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I've decided, after much thought and quite a bit of self-annoyance about the pretentiousness of it, to name myself Athena
, after the Hellenic goddess of wisdom. I did actively fight this name in multiple ways before eventually deciding to go with it.
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So, I was looking at a bill on congress.gov, and I got curious and looked at the XML - they publish the bills as XML and XSLT them client-side into HTML - and I discovered that the enacting clause (Be it enacted
etc.) is not even in the XML. It's so canned they literally have it hard-coded in the XSLT stylesheets. (I found this amusing.)
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So, quite a while ago, I wrote some fan fiction for the Homeworld games, having gotten into them for a while. I've finally done some final proofreading, and I've published them on my Archive of Our Own account (as I usually do with fanfic). Both of these focus on Karan S'jet's perspective, and make an attempt to explore the bizarreness of her relationship to the reality around her.
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Please ensure you dimension all limb positions in radians only to avoid unexpected results.
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Incredible, no socks were eaten in the wash today.
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I added dark mode to my site. It was like 12 lines of code.
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Ahhhh, nothing better than valgrind telling you in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
.
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So... I must apologize for this concept in advance. I've thought, in some fediverse posts, about the concept of using Microsoft's XAML as the basis for a static site generator. This is an XML-based language Microsoft uses for declarative UI in .NET, among other things. Again, let me preface this all with an apology and a clear statement that this isn't really a serious idea, just the result of me getting too much of a concentrated dose of .NET at work.
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I found this comment in the original DOOM source code release README file...
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Gaze upon my creation and despair. Witness... Objective-C#++
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This article by Julia Evans is a really nice and concise expression of a bunch of things I should really be doing (and maybe you too). I'll have to get the full zine when it comes out.
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I spent a few minutes to hunt down and copy-paste a few bits and pieces of trans microfiction I've published on the fediverse, so now they're readable here in a little anthology.
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The subject of this post is meant for adults only.
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arrays now start at whatever index you access first.
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hey, when you are consuming fiction, remember you have this awesome power to stop at any time if you aren't enjoying it
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This article by Anton Zhiyanov makes a lot of the points about SQLite that I'd like to make to people who haven't seriously considered it. There are other things too, but it's a good overview.
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This post is a quick reminder that captions exist to provide an accurate transcription of content that would otherwise be inaccessible. Do not censor captions.
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I added a p-author h-card to my blog template. It's getting a bit visually cluttered, I might need to come up with a less vertical design...
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ProxyPass / http://localhost:54328 # postgres
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User-Agent: fetchwebmention/2.1 (like archive.org_bot, like Googlebot); curl/7.86.0 (compatible)
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New developments in the field of ungodly data format design have led to the following hybrid evilness.
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"Our newest title is Linux-exclusive."
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me trying out she/her pronouns online for the first time: this better not awaken something in me
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Just imagining an isekai main character who doesn't even try to hide it, "yes, yes, two plus two is four, thirty two divided by four is eight, the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is the square root of the sum of the squares of the other two sides, the square root of negative one is the imaginary unit, and the derivative of two X cubed is six X squared, now can we get to magic?"
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Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my actions. (I put salad on the grocery list and now there is salad in the fridge.)
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Today at work I had the misfortune of attempting to work with the Microsoft XSLX format. I hope never to repeat this.
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let's be clear it is true and utter nonsense that the program you use to show the contents of a file is called cat
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Oh no.
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Alright, well, I managed to accidentally soft-brick my machine by overwriting both the active and backup GRUB configuration files. Fixed now.
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Protocols, Not Platforms!
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I'm going to be using this blog more casually. Starting immediately.
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Newtonian physics doesn't allow immovable objects.
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<em> and <strong> are not "the correct way to do italic and bold," despite what WYSIWYG editors may have you believe. <em> is for emphasis, but if you need different text, say, the name of a ship, or a Latin word, <i> is still the right tool. Both elements exist because there is more than one reason to italicize things. If you want italics for purely stylistic reasons, there is yet another tool you should be using: <span style="font-style: italic">.
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I had to fiddle with systemd for a while but I fixed a problem where ejabberd's /run directory wasn't getting created. The LDAP server starts after whenever it would normally happen, and ejabberd's account lives in LDAP for... reasons. Now it waits for the LDAP server to start and then creates it as part of the daemon startup.
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Since I last blogged about my personal infrastructure, I've been up to a few things. I meant to write longer blog posts about each of these, but it's been a bit and I've forgotten quite a few details. Sorry. Here's some quick summaries, though.
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Is there any significant difference between ul {display: flex;} and li {display: inline;}? The latter seems to require less additional work to remove the list markers, pad the items out, etc.
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To follow-up on part 1: In brief, we got it working.
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I like CGI. I know it's slow, but I never run at that scale. It's so simple. I can just write a response to standard output. I don't need to learn a framework, I don't need routing or HTTP parsing, I can just put a normal program on my server and it will work.
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I think the only things left to add to Lillybooks now are a better tokenizer than just splitting on spaces, and a Misskey driver.
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I'm working on Lillybooks again, I've implemented filtering based on CWs, and I'm moving token filtering into the database instead of an external filter file (this is better because it means less bouncing between SQL and Python).
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More than once the Rust compiler has demonstrated a better understanding of good software architecture than me, and as a result of its complaints I ended up with a program that was not just safer but cleaner and more performant.
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I've updated one of my most popular pages, Shooting yourself in the foot in various programming environments, with a number of new additions, and a few changes to more accurately reflect how they make me feel.
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If I could revise the way keyboards work, they would have another two modifier keys, a Lock Screen key, and a Secure Attention key. Also Num Lock would be removed because the presumption would be that you always want to use the numpad as a numpad.
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We embarked on a project to rebuild our home network today; here's what's happened so far.
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This note is just a test.
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y'know if we'd just gone ahead and created ~/etc, ~/var, etc. as part of the standard homedir layout we might not be in this situation
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I really dislike the recent trend of taking command-line tools that were previously implicitly accessible to people with visual disabilities and piling unnecessary TUIs or terminal pseudographics on top so that the actual text stream becomes unreadable or nearly so.
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I love how simultaneously incredibly boring and very exciting RISC-V is.
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Follow-up to Note 2: It appears certain variable substitutions are allowed in cgitrc, including one called $HTTP_HOST. I think that solves this.
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Hmm, problem attempting to switch to cgit: How do I virtualhost?
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I'm gonna have to get rid of these two Go programs. Just download the binary and move it to
sounds nice until you realize you have to do that by hand every time they release a new version./usr/local/bin
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I should probably swear less.
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Has anyone found a good piece of software yet? Just one?
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It's very satisfying to install 365 package upgrades and then only have to restart Firefox which takes like 15 seconds
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Proposing: dm-cloud
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it would be fun to play with the ntoskrnl source some day if intellectual property is abolished or Microsoft goes under
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that's a relief - my backup drive is working again
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Having a personal domain under com implies you consider your personal pursuits a commercial endeavor.
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Does anyone know if it's safe to share a Guix /gnu/store directory between two operating systems on the same disk? It feels like it should be fine, but this kind of thing makes me nervous.
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I found Wine inside the WSL image on my work laptop yesterday. ???
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Okay so microformats2 right
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Here's some more evil use of SQLite.
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Occasionally I get a desire to install like a dozen Windows 2000 VMs and set them up in an Active Directory forest just to see how it worked before they piled 20 years of Innovation on top.
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I made a non-evil database design. This one is an instance of SQLite as an Application File Format, because I've always wanted to do that.
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The best sign of reliable information is URIs matching /wp-content/*.pdf.
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I present, a crime against database design, in interface definition form.
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MediaWiki is one of the best Web applications, because the "Web" part is the focus, not the "application" part.
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If Walt Disney's original EPCOT concept had actually happened it would probably have been destroyed by riots within the first ten years.
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A little while ago, I wrote a couple of Fediverse posts about wanting a sort of broadcast
pipe and subsequently a solution for implementing one without coordination of a list of recipients. (Those are Misskey links, so unless you have a high-powered machine I recommend copy-pasting the URLs into another Fediverse server's search box to load them there instead of opening them directly...)
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So I've talked about this before, but Java as a language is, like... okay.
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Design Patterns Considered Harmful, TBH
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If anyone has a recommendation for a Matrix client or a way of using Matrix via XMPP, I'd appreciate it. I've already ruled out Element, nheko, Quaternion, and FluffyChat, and I'd like to be able to handle encrypted conversations and rooms. I realize there's probably not one but I figured I should ask.
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Need to make my webmention scripts better, they still pull the wrong author from Mastodon replies, and some other problems.
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what it is: memory access violation
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I have far too many project ideas for a person of my level of executive function.
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*sees a commit in my site repository named send/receive mentions*
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What do you mean database
? Everyone around here just uses a directory full of XML files.
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I need to do something quite urgently about the unpaginated, low-content index and Atom feed on this site.
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no points for correctly guessing what the opcode mnemonic iaddi8 means
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I want to stress to those unaware that BitTorrent can be, and often is, used for entirely legitimate purposes. It is a protocol for downloading large files in a scalable way. It's a good choice any time you want to make a big download available to lots of people simultaneously.
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Why is it called a saucepan when it's clearly a pot?
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If you couldn't tell, I'm starting to try and move towards POSSE, using this site.
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The following are legal in Linux (and most other Unix) filenames: ()[]<>$:;&@?`’“!=+*^%#~| and space. (Note here that I do mean Linux, the kernel, not any of the operating systems built on it.)
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For some reason I automatically look at my PineTime whenever my phone buzzes in my pocket, even though I don't have notification forwarding and have never had a smartwatch that does it.
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I'm thinking about dropping Caddy from my Web server setup and switching to using Apache httpd as the reverse proxy.
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Hm, I wonder if Adrian will get this correctly or if I'm going to need to fiddle with it.
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I just noticed that several of my styles were broken by CSP. Now the search box should have proper proportions.
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I'm almost getting addicted to typing scripts/publish, it's just so satisfying to have it automated.
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Okay well there's definitely a lot to fix, like there's no way to find the Atom feed I think, but I'm done for today, that was like six hours of work.
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As you might have guessed, it wasn't quite as simple as typing scripts/publish to roll out the new version. I had to do a lot of troubleshooting of my deployment scripts, and my Apache configuration. But it seems to be working now! :)
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As a follow-up to XSite, I decided to split out my blogging tools into their own project and expand on them to build a proper blogging support package for XSite. I decided to keep blogging tools separate from the core XSite project out of a general pro-modularity attitude; a lot of static site generators bundle blogging in their base configurations, but there's no reason that functionality can't be separate. My approach is to keep XSite as the Python code that provides the core functionality like XSlots, XSLT support, datasets, etc., while implementing blogging support on top of it largely as XSLT and XSlots templates. Much of this work happened in the middle of the night, and often into the early hours of the next day, but I've datestamped it with the day I started each session.
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This is my first test note.