Hi, I’m Jack Baty 👋

A day with Kirby, Hugo, and OpenBSD

Canceling things brings mixed feelings

After yesterday’s Kirby->Hugo-Kirby debacle, I’ve been thinking about why I spend so much time farting around with and on my blog. Fair question, and one I don’t really have an answer to. I guess it’s my little place on the internet and I like to have the furniture arranged just so. But “just so” changes all the time, so I keep trying new configurations. It’s fun. Also useless, and nobody but me cares, but still....

I canceled my Capture One subscription this morning, before it renewed for $180 for another year. I hadn’t planned to do this. The plan was to cancel my Lightroom subscription ($10/month) and run with C1 for the year. Capture One has more to offer, and I like the files I get from it better than from Lightroom. So what happened? When canceling the Lightroom subscription, I was informed that there would be an early-termination fee of $49....

Have you ever been so enamoured with plain-text-static-html publishing that you’re willing to burn down a month of implementing a blog using Kirby CMS in order to go back to using Emacs and Markdown and Hugo? I have.

I just wanted to give a shout-out to Adam Porter for his Org-web-tools Emacs package. I only discovered his package a month or so ago and I’ve used it daily since. Put a URL in the clipboard, then in an Org-document run M-x org-web-tools-insert-web-page-as-entry and bam!, the page is converted into Org’s format and inserted as a heading in the current file. For example, here’s Jason Velazquez’s post about Blogging Platforms, all tucked away nicely in my “Blogging Platforms” Denote note…...

I don’t need a new blogging platform, but if I did, I’d certainly be looking at Prose.sh. It’s blogging via sftp and rsync, which sounds awesome.

It shouldn’t take so much time to keep my stuff running smoothly.

A list of my current subscriptions, priced per month.

It’s possible that no one will ever see this post. I’m writing a Hugo-formatted markdown file in Emacs. This means it will be published to a defunct copy of my blog1 Unless of course I decide to bring it back as baty.net. If that happens, then 👋! ↩︎

Mike mentions disabling Alfred and going back to using Spotlight as an app launcher. I’ve been having similar thoughts. I use Raycast, and its latest release notes are mostly around features of the $8/month subscription version. I thought, there’s no way I’m paying monthly for what’s basically a glorified app launcher, which brought me back to thinking about Spotlight. My first app launcher was Quicksilver and it immediately became an intregal part of using a Mac....

⚠️ This blog is no longer running Kirby, but I left this here just in case. I’ve recently whittled my servers at DigitalOcean down to a single 2GB instance running Caddy. When I started playing with Kirby, I tried getting it running there, but had issues with php-fpm and Caddy not playing well together, so I spun up a hosted instance at (link: https://fortrabbit.com/ text: Fortrabbit). Running Kirby doesn’t require a database or anything fancy, just a web server and PHP, and it bugged me that I couldn’t get it working, so yesterday I tried again, and finally figured it out....

Now that baty.net is running on Kirby, I’m moving this content to a new domain: v13.baty.net

I spent the afternoon with my new grandson yesterday. His name is Lincoln. His middle name is Jack. She gave him my name and that might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. Proud grandpa holding Lincoln The Kirby experiment continues. I did some work on it this morning. You might notice that the home page now shows a grid of recent posts under the latest Journal entry....

The Kirby experiment has been fun, but I’m not sure I’ll finish anything useful.

I spent some of the morning writing a new function for generating posts in Hugo. Then, I spent the rest of the morning building out a scaffolding in Kirby. This can’t end well.

A lisp function for generating either Page Bundles or normal Markdown files when creating new Hugo posts.

How to fix URLs in RSS feeds when using relative paths in page bundles in Hugo

I’ve been having thoughts of more Linux. I’ve got MINT running on the little MacBook Air, but also glanced at the ThinkPad Carbon running Pop_OS that’s sitting on a shelf. It would be fun to play with, but then I remembered that the most productive move I’ve ever made was to stick with running one OS on one computer. Some day that may be Pop_OS on a Thinkpad, but right now it’s macOS on a MacBook Pro....

Blogging options. Where I’ve landed.