My site only publishes from New York time

I ran into a fun problem this week. I moved my Eleventy source files to a different computer and realized that because my post dates are being read from the “date created” metadata of the files in finder, when the website files are copied, all the post display dates reset to the copied date as well, instead of retaining their original created date. I’m now realizing why they recommend NOT using “date created” in the Eleventy docs :)...

There is a way to override the date by manually typing a fixed timestamp in the markdown front matter. I’m annoyed by this because I want to be able to post nearly blank markdown files. In fact, many of my entries didn’t even have front matter previous to this discovery.

I put a lot of effort into reducing the steps to publishing, so I will not tolerate having to type out “date: 2025-03-12T16:43-04:00” every time I want to make a new post. Since I do already have my mkpost() bash script to create an index.md inside a new folder named with the current timestamp, I figured there must be a way to write the date to the contents of the markdown file at the same time as well.

I updated my script to look like this:

mkpost() { 
  export STAMP=$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M-05:00)
  export POSTDIR=src/posts/$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M)
  mkdir -p $POSTDIR
  echo -e "---\ndate: $STAMP\n---" >> $POSTDIR/index.md
}

Great! Except not, because now the hour displayed on the website is different from the hour in the folder name and permalink. I really wanted to tear my hair out because I couldn’t believe how complicated this function had to be in the end. I went from a 1-liner to 12! All to accommodate daylight savings time. In a way I was lucky that this happened across the week where we sprung forward. Otherwise I never would have thought about a variable UTC offset.

I’m pleased to present my new mkpost() script which will automatically account for the clocks changing twice a year:

mkpost() { 
  export DST=$(date +%Z)
  if [ $DST = 'EDT' ]; then
    export OFFSET='04:00'
  else
    export OFFSET='05:00'
  fi
  export STAMP=$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M-$OFFSET)
  export POSTDIR=src/posts/$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M)
  mkdir -p $POSTDIR
  echo -e "---\ndate: $STAMP\n---" >> $POSTDIR/index.md
}

Wasn’t this a thrilling entry??

Annie Ernaux, The Years p. 95:

At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think--no less by books or ads in the Métro than by funny stories--are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. Thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.

Isamu Noguchi, Hawkeye measured time clock and kitchen timer (1932).

I never mentioned it before, but the color scheme here was meant to be based on a red onion. I really love that color purple. It’s difficult to reproduce as a single tone since the actual bulb is a gradation.

Changelog

I always intended to make a decision about organization once I hit 10 posts. I made some big changes to the website structure today to accommodate new ways of manipulating the post library.

What is new:

• Only seven posts now show on the home page. I chose the number seven because there are seven days in a week. If I post every day, one week's worth of posts will appear.

• The eighth post and beyond appear in a list at the end of the home page. People who want to read every post can click into each entry individually.

• Each post is now stamped with the date and the time. I know this is insane, but it's so I can post multiple times per day (like today).

• I've written a bash script to automatically create a new folder in my posts folder that is given the current date and time as its title. The script also creates an index.md file inside this new folder at the same time. This ensures that my permalink matches the "date created" data in the post. The script looks like this:

  mkpost() { mkdir -p -- src/posts/$(date %Y-%m-%d-%H-%M) && touch -- $_/index.md }
  

• I created tag pages so that I can begin to make collections of useful topics. At the moment I'm only using "about", "changelog", and "my-work". This post is included in changelog and can be demonstrated here.

Hope to stop blogging about my blog itself for a little while now :)

Changelog

I moved my hosting from Github Pages to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Even though Github’s service is free, it felt counter to the spirit of my project to work with a company owned by Microsoft. I like the ethos of Nearly Free Speech and their frumpy text-based web presence. My files are living here for $0.02 per day.

Speaking of text-based, I’m feeling very excited about command-line interfaces now that I’ve spent some time uploading and downloading via SSH. Historically, operating in the terminal has been really intimidating for me but this experience setting up my new server space has helped unlock a new confidence and understanding. I am grateful to Michael for confirming that “it’s just files,” and for sparking the idea for the script which publishes the page you are reading now. I’m seeing computers in a new light. Many programs really are just writing files and moving them around. The art of text files and their arrangement is my new obsession.

I’ll leave my first post intact in case anyone would still like to use the resources listed there as a guide for deploying Eleventy with Github Pages. From here, I will now be publishing with the command “npm run woo”, in which “woo” equals:

npx @11ty/eleventy && rsync -zavP --delete /my/local/path/ my_account@my.host.net:/my/remote/path

(saved in the scripts section of my package.json file). This runs the Eleventy build command and, when successful, synchronizes the contents of the _site output folder with the public location on my server. I chose to name it woo because I was excited and “woo” is how I feel every time I post.

Lastly, I wrote a draft of this post on my Supernote as a txt file and then copied it into the Pico editor in my terminal application. I decided if I’m earnest about disengaging from Microsoft, I probably shouldn’t use VS Code to write my blog entries either. Next for me is learning Doom Emacs.

woo!

When I first started working on this blog’s design I thought about building in a script that would automatically insert a blank post at the start of every day. That way, if I didn’t post, the website would fill up with blank lines. I hoped it might encourage regular posting to keep the lines from piling up. Now that my blog has been live for almost two months I feel stressed about how little I am able to keep up with daily or even weekly publishing. Even though I decided the blanks feature would be too cruel and stressful, I still feel the phantom presence of the lines and how many empty days keep going by.

To get out from under the clock pressure, I had the thought to remove the dates from these entries entirely. And actually I’ve been thinking about my practice of excessively adding dates, and sometimes even timestamps, to everything written in my life in general. I’m no longer convinced that it matters to so diligently keep track of time and I wonder if things appearing in chronological order is enough of a structure, or could even link disparate ideas into a single stream.

My issue with undated entries is that I like having permalinks and I like the permalinks to be a dynamic variable. Not every post has a title so the date becomes a fallback title. I guess I have to admit that my use of dates is purely aesthetic for the “data look” and that’s enough of a reason to keep using them? I’m coming to terms with it.

After typing all this out, now I want to implement the blanks script after all lol.