Computing resource I use
After about the 15th time this week forgetting the name of aa tool I use regularly (yea, this is beiginning to concern me too!) I’ve decided to start documenting them here. I started to reach for my wiki, but figured why not share the wealth.
Doc Writer VSCode Profile Template
Backstory
This blog isn’t a ‘normal’ website. It’s a Hugo blog. Hugo is pretty cool. It’s among a long list of static site generators. Long story short, back in the days of old, websites were designed and built file by file. If you went to say the homepage of a website (often called index.html) the server would simply load that file, index.html that is.
As websites got more advanced, we introduced databases and programming languages. In fact, most websites you visit today store their actual data in a database. This has some benefits but, for a blog, they’re really aren’t any.
The database driven model is quite useless for me. My blog is just that, a bunch of articles I write and that’s it. If I needed an interactive display, that is changing something on the screen you’re reading specific to you, then the database and programming would be important, but I don’t. It’s just text!
So Hugo helps me keep this simple. Static site Generators have a lot of a benefits. For one, they’re fast. They go back to the basic principal of how websites started off and add a little bit of help to make life easier. Back in the day, each file would be edited individually. Painstaking, of course. The databases/programatic approach helped with this but they were realativly fast back then. Computers were a lot slower and so was our internet connection, but the actual web server didn’t have to do much.
Adding all of those scripts to process each page was time consuming and slowed things down. Ever been to a website that takes forever to load, probably a database query taking forever….
In any case, back to Hugo. Hugo doesn’t run on the server and unlike those database based blog tools (WordPress being one of them, yes) it runs just once. I simply write my articles or pages in a simple markup language called markdown. Then I can run Hugo and Hugo builds all of my pages for my site based on my template. It’s even further automated with some other tools, but I won’t get into those today.
Enter Doc Write Profile Template for VSCode
Since my website is basically just a bunch of text files that are processed by a quick script locally, I don’t need or get a fancy web interface. This has benefits, 1 I can write an article anywhere. Internet or no internet and sync it up once I get online again. In theory I could also send the article over HF radio and have someone publish it for me but I don’t bother, still it’s possible. But, without that interface, I am missing something. VSCode is my preferred editor but it’s missing a few features from a word processor. Mainly, spell check that works well. There are a few other benefits such as checking to make sure your markdown is complexly correct. I’ve messed up a few advanced markups before but it’s pretty simple. In any case, this doc write profile works fairly well for me.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/profiles#_doc-writer-profile-template
Updates?
I’ll keep this article updated as I find new tools that might be useful.