Mikes Writing

Thursday afternoon writing

It's the afternoon after some walking, coffee, and then a great lunch or dinner or whatever it was my wife made for me. Today it was French fries, bbq chicken with chili and other goodies, and fresh broccoli. I don't get Khmer food a lot here but when she feels like it she will make soup or curry or some other stuff. One of the things I love that she makes is LokLak which she makes very special for me. Most of the food is a blend of Cambodian spices with western foods and sometimes cooked on the Cambodian grill which I simply love.

Today its a Thursday and I've been here at home for some days. I get this desire to go out and have some beer downtown. I really have tried stopping this lately because I don't like how I feel after and it also causes some discomfort with sleep the next days. I'm better not going but I really love the escape downtown. I often go to one of the Viva restaurants mainly because I know the people that work there and they will stop by and chat with me about their lives. Ask me about mine. Its a social thing and I sometimes feel I don't get much of that.

writing here and there

I've been very tempted to stop using 11ty along with GitHub and Netlify to do my blog. I have been following Pika lately again and writing there is a lot of fun. I decided though not to go there because the writing here is so much more basic. Any markdown editor will do the work and the main thing is simply copying the resulting markdown file to my local git repo and then doing the few commands to send things along. Netlify then picks it up and publishes and builds my blog. Unless I make an error like yesterday when I noticed I messed up with the front matter and did not include a space where it wanted in the title. This causes the build to fail and if I don't see the post or see it crossposted to mastodon, I go check the build output on netlify. There I saw the failed build. It actually provides decent diagnostic information:

The build fails due to a YAML front matter syntax error in content/blog/Writing my morning.md.

As shown at line 64, the title field is missing a space after the colon:

title:writing my morning YAML requires a space after the colon for key-value pairs. Fix it like this:

title: writing my morning

This only happens occasionally to me and Netlify is very friendly with its AI interpretation of what happened and tells me how to fix it. Thanks AI!

So while I would love to go write on Pika, I don't think its a thing I will do. I am spoiled with markdown files being the output and having this very simple (but sometimes frustrating) little engine to do the work for me. I also feel like the writing is a thing for me now. I have published a post a day and sometimes even two. I feel like I have this blog now which just works.

beer take two and three and maybe more

Well, its about 230pm. I have this feeling I need to just go do something different. So I think I will have to go and drink some beer and then tomorrow will go see my friend for coffee.

Now it's beer time. A Thursday unravels. No more yaml errors. I will be a front matter warrior. Doublechecking my front and my matter. All good. Let it go netlify.