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Streamlining my gemlog posting experience

02-01-2022 (b0)

I waste a lot of time screwing around with my laptop.

Which is worth it every single time.

I swear.

Yes.

I'm not lying.

Anyways, it is true that modifying your environment to be more conducive to the things you are trying to achieve is genuinely helpful, so let's get into:

1) It sure would be nice if gemlog.blue was a discrete application and not a website...

If I'm going onto the internet I am most likely using Firefox. My particular instance is loaded up with privacy extensions and other tools to make my internet experience better. However, all of these things are kinda distracting for writing up blog posts.

Turns out Firefox doesn't really have a good way of achieving this but Chrome does. So begrudgingly I installed Google Chrome. Lol I absolutely did not do that. Instead I installed Ungoogled Chromium

Here's where you can find that for whatever system you might be on.

Once we have that set up we need to create a way of launching gemlog.blue as an application. To do that we just need to create a .bat file with the following code:

@echo off

start chrome --app="https://gemlog.blue"

exit

And were're done! I can now make changes to my gemlog without ever touching a fully featured browser.

Note (b1): In my current version of setup I just have the "Add Post" page set as the home page for the browser rather then using the .bat file because then I can just pin the browser straight to the taskbar and launch straight into gemlog.blue from there.

2) I sure wish gemlog.blue had a dark mode...

Simple fix! Just install a chrome extension that converts light mode sites into dark mode. Only one problem... Ungoogled Chromium won't just let you install extensions from the chrome store. In order to get an extension up and running you need to download the .crx file and drag it into the extensions list in the browser.

Note: Make sure to enable "Developer Mode" and restart the browser otherwise the extensions will not prompt for install after being dragged into the window.

Here's the extension file extractor

And here's where ya drop em

Now all that's left is to actually install the extensions. Here are the ones I used (this is not an endorsement)

General Dark Mode Extension

Adds Dark Mode Scrollbars

(The scrollbars extension seems to be have been made unnecessary in recent versions of chrome)

3) I wish there was a away to automatically add my footer as well as save what I'm writing...

For the footter I'm using an auto fill extension.

Which can be found here

Now, whenever I open the "New Post" tab on the site it autofills two newlines and the link to my "Who am I?" page which is exactly what I wanted.

For recovering what I'm writing I'm using a form recovery tool

Here's where you can find that

This is probably my least favorite of the bunch since it is kinda annoying to use for this purpose, but it has saved me in aa pinch. If my laptop dies while writing a post I can rest easy knowing that I can probably recover it.

So, what does a post workflow look like?

Option 1:

Write the entire entry on the site, either all at once or over a few days, and after completion post it. This is obviously the simplest workflow and I used it for my post "Finally getting a gemlog off the ground"

Option 2:

Write the post a bit at a time posting it piece by piece through the "Edit Post" tab. This lets me preview what has already been written through my gemini client (I'm using Lagrange) and makes it really easy to come back and pick up where I've left off. The main downside to this approach is that incomplete posts become publicly availably. Honestly, it doesn't really bother me all that much so I intend to keep using this option. The only thing that is genuinely very frustrating is that gemlog.blue has no way to change the post title after it goes up. Worst case scenario I can just delete the post and repost with a new title, but still this shouldn't really be an thing considering how easy it should be to implement this feature.

In Conclusion:

Obviously writing things offline and then putting them up on the gemlog later on is the most surefire way to get to have a local backup of my shit as well as accomplish a lot of these goals. (In addition to being able to use git for version control) However, there's something to be said about having an easy way to do all of this directly from the site. While I don't see my self using gemlog.blue forever, or even necessarily this process of posting, while it is my tool of choice I'm happy that I have it set up in a way that makes me feel more comfortable cranking out blog posts.

See all of y'all in the next one!

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3-10-2023 (b1) Some updates were made to reflect new information and my experience in setup.