#Sw

A forum foray into end-of-year management summaries (with ledger-cli) had a handful of people asking about my blog setup and its speed. I realized it’s changed significantly from posts three years back (and where I was using Jekyll and Gatsby), so time for an update post.

TLDR

The benefits of this setup are:

• very fast - due to static content and CDN (content delivery network)
• cheap - pennies-a-glass: it costs me ~$1 USD a month even for very large traffic amounts
• discovery - unlike other setups on managed providers like Github Pages etc, it’s SEO-friendly
• easy-to-operate - simple, easy commands to setup and execute deploys
• zero-maintenance - other than Amazon SSL cert updates (now automatic), have not touched it in nearly 3 years now

Despite the fact I was not the biggest Go fan at the time, I tried Hugo . Hugo was blazingly fast to build, has a heap of convenience features I really liked, and a nice ecosystem of plugins, along with some decent themes. Also, it compiles/comes as a single static binary to use. While Jekyll and Gatsby are both nice, both were dead slow to generate (additionally, every node update kept breaking Gatsby or its plugins when I was using it.). Hugo also takes care of your asset pipelining for you which can be a major headache with other static site generators.

Command-line interface (CLI) tools have gone through rapid innovation in the last couple years. Ancient stalwarts have been challenged with better newcomers that make life easier, quicker, and better. I feel this Cambrian explosion of new tools may be because of better CLI creation libraries, but think a certain nod has to go to systems programming languages like Go and Rust becoming more popular.

In the vein of my 2021 Software Tools list , and the CLI LIfe Starter post, I’ve run across a whack of great CLI tools in the last couple months which I incorporated into my workflows, and a notable fistful of five. All are available on both OSX (via homebrew) and Linux.

I experimented a lot with process during pandemic lockdown and with the shift to WFH. Successful experiments had tooling implications. While I do feel tools are less important than your actual process — process trumps all — some tools do make some things you want to emphasize or change easier (or conversely, your existing tools might make it harder).

The big changes in my flow came about from trying to come up with a more web-based, easier sharing and collaborative process than emacs org-mode allowed. I wanted a nicer, more modern writing experience, and abstractions to keep me better organized than a flat file or folder hierarchy. Additionally, I wanted to experiment with implementing a Zettelkasten after reading How to Take Smart Notes which a note-taking-as-thinking organizational system purporting to be conducive to learning, creativity, and content creation, particularly in the academic arena. So, I needed effortless bi-directional linking of concepts, a beautiful writing environment that organized itself but could be modified, and robust task management.

Rofi Org-mode TODOs is a simple script for use with the Rofi dmenu replacement to hotkey and then directly enter emacs org-mode TODOs and dispatch and append them to an inbox file. It’s simple, very fast, and designed to help you stay in flow while having ubiquitous collection of your TODOs for your GTD flow.

This first release in Python simply takes the text and tags from your input, formats the TODO in the proper format for emacs org-mode with a proper :DESCRIPTION: drawer with creation date, and appends in the proper format to your inbox file. Future versions will parse for notes, deadlines, or scheduled items, but this first version is functional and works right now. You can grab it here on Github