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This is a collection of some of the things I've written about, recently. I am a perpetual tinker, and most of the things that I find the energy to write about are in that vein of things. This is Not a Writer's Log, but a Tinker's Notebook.

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You Are The Weakest Link. Goodbye.

Published on 01/04/2022 |

As of commit 5294ffb, Vapid is no longer maintained. Which is an unfortunate surprise for me, as this blog is self-hosted using Vapid, and most of the time I have spent on it was post-commit. I had no idea until today.

According to the CMS's README, "This repository is no longer maintained. Issues and pull requests will no longer be answered or approved. The repository will remain read-only though, so that users can fork and use elsewhere. Thank you for a good run."

So in the meantime, I'll be maintaining a fork for my own sake, and hunting down alternatives. The core criteria that drew me to Vapid in the first place are its relative simplicity, consistency in construction, and the incredible flexibility of the template system upon which Vapid is built. There are a handful of template tags that give me some basic editorial consistency throughout the site. These tags provide some semantic structure to the content. The presentation of that content is more or less built using the kinds of tools you might expect to use when working on a static site generator, but once the structure of the website itself is established, adding more content is trivially done through the automagically generated dashboard.

This blog, for example, is just built out of a couple of template tags and a layout template. All the content is added after the fact, through the dashboard. I am absolutely in love with this kind of minimal middle ground, somewhere between the kitchen sink WordPress and a tiny little static site generator. (I have a historical love affair with werc that has left an unmistakable mark on my aesthetic preferences regarding the web.)

While I'm climbing down the gradient of locating a suitable replacement for Vapid (or compelling myself to start hacking on what's available), I'll also be adding research into content aggregation and automated curation processes to help quell my addiction to socially-driven content aggregation. I strongly suspect that if I can narrow down a few of the metrics that define how I judge information worth reading through, I can generate an aggregation feed for my own perusal (and stop refreshing r/popular every few minutes.)

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