Title: Value of Adventure
Date: June 26, 2016
Tags: website
========================================

A.K.A The point of pointless endevers.

So far, I am spending more time trying to hammer the square peg of my blogging
tools into the round hole of what I want to build for a blog.  I'm finding the
limitations of the design of sblg and the limits of my experience with make
(which was almost zero before this).

One could argue that I am using the wrong tools for the job or for my level of
knowledge/patience, but part of the point of even doing this is to play with
stuff I haven't used before.  I am just about at the point where I could spend
less time scrapping sblg and make and replacing them with a perl script of my
own design.  But I already know how to do substitution in perl (which is what
sblg does).  Make's only contribution to all of this is simply change detection
which is of little value since the site can be regenerated in less than a second
so I wouldn't even bother implementing it.

I *think* the only thing I need to fix at this point is change detection of the
articles and article template.  It worked with a single make file but I couldn't
correctly generate links (permanent links and navigation links) with articles in
a sub-directory that way.  I worked around that with some hard coding and a
sub-Makefile.  But the articles Makefile doesn't seem to be able to detect when
the article template changes, nor does the parent Makefile know to check for
changes to the articles.  I'm sure I could figure out proper make recursion to
solve this.  The other problem is having to maintain the article list twice.
Once with the straight file names, and again including the directory.  I don't
like doing things twice to make automation work.  Maybe I can process the
article list and prepend the path automatically.

I think the design of sblg lends itself to a flat file structure.  But I don't
want a hundred files all in one directory.  Articles go into the articles
directory, the rest of the crap can go in the root.


Not to be the type to walk away while I can still think of something I haven't
tried, I already fixed my major problems with make.  My only remaining issues is
having to define files multiple times still.