TrickJarrett.com

Sometimes the correct answer is to not touch it anymore

7/1/2023 8:05 am |

Yesterday I did a surprising amount of coding on Glowbug. Most of it entirely invisible to you all. The quick overview:

  1. Bluesky embeds (we'll come back to this)
  2. Updating my css editor page in the admin to be able to edit any of the template files
  3. Updated my image management page in the admin to have pagination
  4. Simple CSS updates

Okay, so let's come back to Bluesky.

I managed to get invited to it yesterday, as noted when I shared my (current) account name. It's fine. It feels like basic Twitter. What I loved though was seeing how simple generating an embed URL can be. It's just an iframe to a path which includes the desired post.

Great.

Except that took me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand why the Markdown generation of my blog continually failed to handle embedded html example iframe to show how clean the embed code is. Embedding html in posts in my blog is currently one of the things which is broken and I haven't really fixed because I never do it. Except for yesterday when I wanted to do it.

It's broken in a few ways:

  1. When I go back to edit that post, the embedded html is processed as html into the in-browser editor, which often leads to it breaking itself.
  2. The code tag delineations are no help here. Even wrapping the iframe in HTML's 'pre' or 'code' tags didn't stop it from rendering as html. And I have no idea why.

So, this means once I submit a post with embedded html, I can't touch it again except directly through the database.

I'll figure this out eventually, but I didn't last night.

And as I did these various codings, I apparently broke something. The automated end-of-day post didn't happen. The code that generates it wasn't even something I worked on yesterday, but because of how the blog is coded it's quite possible I accidentally messed it up.

So I tried to figure it out this morning. In doing so, I also noticed the newsletter generation wasn't working. So I worked on that some.

None of these, by the way, have satisfactory "I fixed it!" resolutions. The newsletter eventually sent, though I don't know why. We'll see if the end of day post runs tonight or not.

Sometimes, when you run and use your own code, if it suddenly works - the correct answer is to not touch it anymore.