In following up with yesterday's post, I've found success with a Jekyll/Github combo for web hosting; I now have a better handle on the GitHub Desktop. It was really just a matter of setup: instead of treating it like a FTP client, I should have considered it in terms of a syncing client like WebDAV or something similar. I re-created my repository from GitHub, pulled it down to make changes, and then GitHub Desktop uploaded only those files I altered. And when I made changes to the files via the site, the client informed me of its need to sync. Pretty cool.

I'm leaning toward adopting Github Pages for this website. As referenced yesterday, I'm working with a new theme and while there's some pretty cool features to it, it's a little bit of a hassle to form it into a something resembling my WordPress install. I don't plan to emulate it, but I do want the same overall feel. I've banged my head a little with it, so much I'm considering to just develop my own theme outright—still, I'd prefer just to adopt someone else's code and splatter some CSS in its direction.

In the move, I'll most likely get rid of a couple of features: currently playing and my countdown clock, two plugins that are no longer maintained by their authors, making them security risks, though I have some faith in my WP-CLI approach to maintenance. Honestly, I'd like to move to static so that I can giggle at my daily Cylon visits from China, Russia, Amazon AWS and more!

In replacing TablePress, I'm considering on adapting DataTables to talk with Google Sheets. It beats maintaining a static table—that's for SURE—and will hopefully resolve the problem I'm having with Google Charts rendering two tables on the same page. I can get multiple charts to render, but perhaps there's some sort of syntax I gotta run down.

And honestly, if I can get way from those darn "smart" single and double quotes that my WordPress install renders by default, my world will rock! OK, so I'm sure I could fix that, but, I honestly just don't want to fool with something I don't otherwise notice if I wasn't maintaining two sites at the same time with identical content.

Ugh, these have been the bane of my life since I was learning to drive:

• 1993: Microsoft released smart quotes
• 1994: Microsoft released Comic Sans

Who hated humanity on that design team? Might be this guy.

I've been playing around with a Jekyll and GitHub Pages environment as a replacement for this WordPress hosting. The chief advantage is in its inherently static nature in the context of providing an "easy" way to update across all pages, something in which is historically hard to do with static pages, though I've had limited success in capturing keystrokes through Notepad++ if every page I created follows the same template.

The Jekyll and Github solution promotes its ease of use and you'll have to know far less, unlike WordPress's HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, and whatever else. In practice, however, a WordPress user can just use the GUI and press post whereas Jekyll/GitHub requires a developer's mindset.

Now, life would be a lot easier if I currently was running with Linux Mint, but as I'm not, setting up a Ruby environment which in turn utilized a Linux subsystem in a Windows 10 context just for Jekyll to run was NOT like the ease for which I set up my XAMPP dev environment. Though to be fair, I don't know if the Ruby Installer option actually requires the subsystem.

Fortunately, the documentation is helpful: jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/windows/

Then the rest of the Jekyll setup is straightforward: jekyllrb.com/docs/

Now, you can begin! I hope you're talented at fetching documentation for configuration and know your way around a solid text editor!

I found the default theme to be unwieldy and could never get the pagination to work correctly. I'm sure I could eventually getting it to run, but C'MON, I'm just crossing the threshold of your environment and I gotta run down solutions for things that should just work out of the box—it's hard to garner adoption.

Still, after stumbling across a data scientist's personal site cross-validated.com...

...I was led to a GREAT theme with AWESOME documentation: mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/docs/configuration/

The theme's author breaks from the standards in Front Matter, but nothing Notepad++'s find-and-replace couldn't mop up! I migrated my site's content and was ecstatic that the theme's author made the equivalent of a child-theme for my CSS additions.

Everything ran great on my local system! Before studying how GitHub works, I just figured I'd use the GitHub Desktop and just ram it up onto the host, not unlike I would in a FTP Client. No dice. I then opted to upload my 2 MBs of data through the GitHub site. Whether or not this worked, I don't know, because I realized my chief concern: what good is the service in the rural context of being ever so fragilely tethered to the Internet via my phone's mobile hotspot that for every single post, I'd have to upload 2 MB each time?! Of course, this is in the backdrop of my current lack of knowledge with GitHub Desktop.

Still, I'm a bit curious in how I can make the transition, even if it's a chore to publish one post, basically starting from Step 3 here, followed by a cascade of button pushing: guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/

It's not exactly the stuff of WordPress's one-click to live.

I don't mind using markdown for composition for in an HTML context, it leaves the hassle of P tags behind and I've never been good with table creation, though markdown's table creation remains arcane in comparison to the WP plugin I use (TablePress). It's not as simple as WordPress's word processor environment, but there was a time I used to run WordPress without that feature and just tagged by hand (I never liked all the meta data it adds).

Have I left the Jekyll/GitHub combo? I've only fooled with it for a couple days and I need more time with GitHub itself. I'd assume that it only uploads after I run the Jekyll build locally, and if that's the case, then I'm more apt to make the move.

But for now, my workflow is to write in FocusWriter, paste into WordPress and just click play.

Despite my writing in the past of a potential to skip working out in The 13th Expedition, I'm planning to train this week.

I did weigh the merits of no workouts with a shift into The 14th Expedition into meditation and yoga. Those merits were driven by two things: 1) the novelty of weightloss without the 3-something mornings; 2) and this jaw thing going on—it's the whole physics of it. For example, when I hit the heavy bag, the heavy bag's hitting me reverberates through my body and slaps my jaw. That's not exactly the best methodology of a focused, joint relaxation regimen!

Nevertheless, even now as I listen to The 4th Expedition's playlist, I want to move and push out toward the horizon. And I'm shifting toward greater sensitivity of low impact workouts like more elliptical work.

The impetus of my workouts is to advance my physical and cognitive capacities. Whether 2018 or today, diet has always been the chief thrust for success. And as the calendar months fluttered off the wall, I just believe that my new diet is superior to my past 1000-1200 kcal diets.

...which is the point of this post, promoting those questions of our motivations and applying optimized approaches to achieving success all within an environment, that, let's face it, hits back.