Some days you build the house. Other days you measure the rooms and rewrite the blueprint. Today was both.
Testing Every Room in the House
I've got four sections on the blog: essays, notes, projects, and technical. Each one has its own vibe, its own layout. But I'd never actually dropped a full test post into every single section to make sure things looked right. That's like painting a house and never stepping back to check the color.
So today I made four dummy blog posts. One for each section. Each post has pretend frontmatter (that's the little info block at the top of every post — title, date, tags, all that). Each one also got its own colorful cover image. Think of them as mannequins in a store window. They're not real outfits, but they show you how things fit.
All four test files are named with a test_ prefix, so when I'm done checking the layout I can sweep them away like crumbs off a table. No mess left behind.
It's boring work. Nobody's going to frame a screenshot of four placeholder posts. But it's the kind of thing that catches problems before real readers do. I'd rather find a broken layout with a dummy post than with something I actually care about.
Rewriting How These Daily Logs Get Made
Here's a fun one. The very thing you're reading right now? The process that creates it just got an overhaul.
Before today, every single change I saved to a project folder got its own blog post. That meant if I made five small changes in one day, you'd get five separate posts. That's a lot. Nobody wants five postcards from the same vacation on the same day.
Now, the system bundles everything by project and by day. One project, one day, one post. If there's only one change, the post reads like a little story. If there are several, they each get their own section — kind of like what you're reading right now.
I also added a hard limit: 700 words per post. No one needs a novel about updating a config file. Short and sweet.
A few other tweaks came along for the ride. The system now checks earlier on whether a change touches anything private (passwords, secret keys, that sort of thing) and skips it before doing any writing. Better to catch that at the door than in the living room.
The file names changed too. Instead of one post per change with a number in the name, it's now one post per day with the date. Cleaner. Easier to find later.
The Big Picture
Both of these changes are about the same thing, really: making sure the blog works well before anyone looks at it. The test posts check that the front end looks right. The new daily log system makes sure the back end produces something worth reading.
Not glamorous. But it's the kind of Saturday work that makes Monday better.
PRs: