Ages ago, in the era of blogs, I used WordPress for a few years, but at the time I was too convinced that programming was too hard for me to properly learn enough web development to really customize things, and eventually I stopped writing as other interests drew my attention.

Here’s the boring story of how I ended up all the way back at WordPress after learning enough programming that nothing really scares me anymore…

Long ago, as many teens do, I wrote poetry now and then. And then I learned to hate my poetry, and I stopped. I wonder if I could just be kind to myself and enjoy trying?

While this pandemic drags on, the load has thankfully lightened close to home. Finally have some time to add another recipe summary of one I’ve learned to get comfortable with in the past year.

This is how I like to make chili. Based on this Serious Eats recipe I was directed to by KB, but a short version for my reference:

I don’t know if this is the “right” way to do this, but it’s working for me at the moment, and since it took a bit to figure out, I figured I’d write up my notes.

My needs are simple: when I’m happy with an update to my blog, or another elixir phoenix app I run, Shift73k (or more in the future), I’d like to be able to just commit to my repository, and then have those changes go live. At the moment I run both gitea and my other little apps on the same Linode, so I was able to set it up like this:

While re-implementing my website in elixir/phoenix, I wanted to include an RSS feed for the blog posts. Luckily I found pretty much everything I needed in Daniel Wachtel’s Building an RSS Feed with Phoenix post, but since I’m making use of LiveView, I ran into one hiccup—errors about a missing root.xml layout!

After a few months working with Writefreely, (kept separate from a static webpack-generated front page), I just really didn’t like the feel of keeping a blog in separate software with a database, when the content itself was just markdown. Probably the thing to do would be to hop on the static site bandwagon, but I’ve been spending so much time learning elixir & phoenix for other projects, I didn’t relish spending time learning a whole new toolchain.

Luckily, there are good resources on basing a blog off markdown files in Elixir Phoenix, in a manner basically as speedy as a static site. So…

Another good meal prep. We just use frozen cheese tortellini. Can use frozen broccoli, but broccoli rabe is preferred.

For the sausage, we prefer Premio Italian chicken sausage.

Adapted from From BudgetBytes, the original makes use of pre-cooked chicken (rotisserie, roasted, whatever)—but I’ve enjoyed it with chorizo-style chicken sausage as well.

Preheat oven to 350

So as you know, I just throw my meatloaf together, but here are my estimates based on a bunch of published recipes:

So simple, so easy, so good—I often forget I can make this.