Yesterday I wrote about how my blog needs more images.
Let’s get serious about fixing that, without needing to create any more ideas or tools (we have enough).
Reflecting back on yesterday’s post, I realise I probably could put markdown for images in my posts. It’s super easy to write something like
The hard/annoying part would be getting that image in the right place on my website.
Or actually…
I guess it wouldn’t be too hard. Lemme give it a go.
There’s no way to rename an image on my phone!?!?!? And there’s no way to rename it when you upload it to github either!!!!!?????!!!! So when I upload an image, I’ll have to link it in like…
That’s a pain to copy paste and cut down. I can’t believe I can’t edit the image’s name on the github website.
In fact, using the github website in general is a real pain on my phone. Every time I upload an image, it doesn’t navigate me back to the folder I was just in. It takes me all the way back to root!?!?!!! So to upload multiple images, I have to navigate all the way back, or do some clumsy buggy back swipes, through a couple of broken forms.
At this point, some people might reach for building some sort of tool to do this all for them. I could imagine a tool that handles all of this for me - it could connect with the github API, or do some things automatically.
But I’ve told you, I’m absolute about this. No more tools!
In some ways, I did make a tool when I made my feed maker. It generates my RSS feed for me.
It helps a lot. But…
I made that tool quite early on in my explorations of the tadi web, and I wasn’t very good at the “no more tools” approach, and I have suffered greatly for that. That feed maker has become buggy many many many times, and I haven’t “let it die” as I was supposed to, and it has grown into a bigger and bigger pain and time-sink. It has become a “product” that I’m now attached to.
What I should have done is - kill the feed maker every time it went buggy. And I should have made a better, simpler, more throwaway one each time.
I am not developing tools, I am developing skills, and a practice of ultra-simplicity, with no compromise, without escape! Software isn’t a thing, it’s a craft. A chair maker doesn’t develop a single chair for years on end. They make more and more chairs, better chairs. And they don’t pass on chairs to future generations. They pass on skills and knowledge and experience and expertise. We should see software the same way.
It’s a dangerously thin line between a tool (bad) and a throwaway solution (good).
When we write some code that does a job for us, how do we stop it from turning into a project of its own?
Perhaps by making it hyper-specific to what we’re doing in that specific moment. Or perhaps by making it unmaintainable. Write-only code. Reading is impossible.
In my case, my problem is that I don’t know how to write a throwaway solution for uploading images to my github repo. I can’t do it quick enough to make it lightweight.
In my experience of tadi-webbing over the past 8 months, I’ve discovered that solutions are often less about writing better code, and more about building a better ecosystem. Environmental factors are far more important. This has been a surprise to me.
So… instead of trying to solve my github problem, I should look at what I can change at a higher level.
Should I use github at all? I could switch to codeberg, but it works in a similar way, as far as I can tell.
I could put my entire website into a server box, and say goodbye to git history. But from my exploration, that involves loads of nightmarish terminal use, and ‘user experience’ is completely non-existant.
I could switch my images over to another host, I suppose, and leave the website’s content where it is. What if I hosted my images on imgur or another mobile-friendly uploader. Is that even allowed? It would still be very fiddly, but less-so.
Splitting up images from the content seems like a bad idea though. It would get hard to track where they are, and moving the content would become hard. I could become more attached to (a) particular service(s).
AAAAA
WHY CAN’T I JUST DROP IMAGES AND MARKDOWN IN A FOLDER FROM MY PHONE AND HOST IT
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE INTERNET PEOPLE
This could be so easy. why aren’t more future of coding people working on this. so much obsession with making new tools and languages and
i think we should build software bottom-up, not top-down, and there is so much unexplored unsolved at the lowest level. i’ll not make anything else until i can put pictures on my website from my phone — without having to fight
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