Devlog: August 30, 2023

I worked on my blog layout today. As much as I love Blot, developing a custom theme is not very simple. I’ve never been able to get the local Blot environment running, so my dev process is make a change, wait for it to update on my live site, then check to see how it is 😬.

I wanted to update my homepage so that I could have sections for different tags. Right now I’m envisioning one section for devlogs, one for some up coming stuff, and then everything else. The Blot templating uses Mustache—which I don’t really understand—and also doesn’t provide me a lot of control. So for only showing the first 3 devlogs, I have to actually put all of them in the DOM, then use CSS to hide all but the first 3.

{{#all_entries}}
    {{#tagged.devlog}}
    <div class="recent-post">
        <a href="{{{url}}}">{{title}}</a>
    </div>
    {{/tagged.devlog}}
{{/all_entries}}

.recent-post:nth-child(n+4) {
    display: none;
}

Not the most elegant, but works.

I would like to redesign my whole blog, but without a solid local dev experience, it really sounds like a chore. I’ve looked around for other CMS options, but publishing with Blot is so gosh darn easy, everything else looks archaic in comparison. So may need to spend more time working on getting Blot running locally.

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