I haven’t published a lot to GitHub in some time, mostly for reasons caused by me. I blocked most outbound connections, including port 22, which broke my habit of using SSH to push commits. (I did not, at the time, think of using a jump host.) I used the gh command (GitHub CLI) until the signing key expired. In their how-did-this-happen? section, the CLI team shifted the blame, further “explaining” that both they and their management were incompetent. That team is no longer permitted to run code on my systems.

The other problem is so-called AI. GitHub wants me to have Copilot, and my updated workflow makes use of Podman Desktop, which also wants me to have AI in a non-dismissable ad. The inability to express non-consent on these platforms is a constant drain on me.

“Vote with your wallet,” they say. “Leave a service if you don’t like it.” But that doesn’t work if the market leader takes a wrong turn, and everyone follows.

I added a light theme for user-agents that support preferring light color schemes. Dark is still the default, because it’s the correct way to have a color scheme, despite people shouting at me on the internet from 2002 until the advent of dark mode that “dark themes go against biological fact.” How strange that the biological essentialism vanished overnight, almost as if it were never true.

While I was updating the stylesheet, I fixed some 2009-isms in it, like IE-specific rules and prefixed border-radius rules. This is the future.

I accidentally discovered that the theme I was using performs an extremely inaccurately named “reset” that wipes out the only style :focus really has. So I put something back on all the links.

The colors got switched up a bit, too. There’s less purple/yellow and more red/blue. I even reworked the 800px design to resize fluidly down to 320px, for an improved mobile experience.

The desktop layout has Before and After screenshots.

I didn’t really have a place to pre-announce changes to my repos, so I made one.

This spawned a small adventure through staticgen in order to find a static site generator. I really wanted it to run on Win64, because I have to fire up a VM to update propaganda since it was built for a POSIX world. For style points, I went for ones written in languages I already have installed.

So after trying Hugo, Sculpin, Phrozn, and Pelican, the last one happened to be a winner.

I’m kind of sad Hugo didn’t work out, since it seems fast and nicely built, but I couldn’t get it to understand about generating pages with relative URLs so that I could preview them with the theme applying properly.

One of the PHP frameworks wasn’t PHAR-aware, and tried to use DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR to build the path of an XML file to load… but that creates an invalid URL when DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR isn’t ‘/’.

Pelican has its warts, to be sure (there’s no real themes gallery, just a bunch of githubs with screenshots of varying quality) but it’s working and I can work with it. And I’m not locked into keeping all my pages on github because Octopress is secretly managing the repository for me; I wrote my own publish script. Although magic is convenient, it turns out that I always want to understand the next layer down. Even if it’s just a small bit of knowledge I never use, it’s comforting to know I wouldn’t be hopelessly adrift if GitHub Pages closed down.

Anyway, look for future updates about my repositories here on sapphirecat.github.io. I want to get away from the “randomly dump breaking changes on an unsuspecting world” model of development.