Sean Gillies (Posts about blog)

New cert for the site

Sean Gillies — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 07:00:51 GMT

Earlier today my old certificate from gandi.net expired while my new one was pending, leaving my blog twisting in the wind. I had such a positive experience two weeks ago with certbot on my local trails web app, that I did the same for my main site this evening. I hope you weren't inconvenienced by a couple hours of security warnings.

Bringing Blogging Back

Sean Gillies — Sat, 14 Oct 2017 23:59:54 GMT

I'm unhappy with Twitter, the platform, and its featured user, the Asshole-in-Chief of the U.S.A. Without a better idea, I'm bringing blogging back. Bookmark https://sgillies.net/tags/life.html or https://sgillies.net/tags/work.html, or both. Drop them into Feedly or whatever. This is where you can find out what I'm up to and what I'm thinking about.

Blog Makeover

Sean Gillies — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 20:14:46 GMT

The feature I need most in a static site generator right now is incremental builds. Regenerating the hundreds of existing posts on my site has become a barrier to posting often. I'm trying Nikola and am satisfied so far. With each new post there are still a number of files to be regenerated – the index page and feed, pages and feeds for tags I've used – but the write, preview, publish cycle feels much faster.

Syndication feeds for the tags I use is a feature I gave up in 2013 when I quit blogging on Zope, but they're back thanks to Nikola. See https://sgillies.net/tags/rasterio.html and https://sgillies.net/tags/rasterio.atom for example.

I'm using "work" and "life" tags to make it easier to subscribe to posts that are mainly about programming and spatial data processing or posts that are mainly about food, running, and being a temporary resident of France. This doesn't mean that I'm making my work feed a safe space for people who don't want to hear about workplace diversity, climate change, and politics or that there won't be any posts about maps and computing in my lifestyle feed.

Thanks for reading my blog. I hope the changes work for you, too.

Downgrading my blog

Sean Gillies — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Welcome to my new blog. It's made with Tinkerer. I'm calling it a downgrade because there's no more database, no more comments, no more Python objects published for every request. It's just rsync and static HTML generated by Tinkerer and Sphinx from ReStructured Text docs I type into Vim. There are moving parts in this new blog, but they are all on my laptop. None of them are deployed to a web server.

My old posts were all written using ReST, so migrating is going to be easy peasy. Until I get around to it, old posts will be at http://sgillies.net/olden-days-blog/ and I'll make sure the old URLs redirect.

Ongoing blog series

Sean Gillies — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I've been writing some posts under the rubric of "geoprocessing for humans". These are generally about keeping software simple, predictable, symmetrical, safe, readable, and well-documented. And simple. Most of all: simple.

A couple of my recent posts are a little different, being about functional programming, partial functions, processing entire files of records without using any for loops, etc – stuff that a GIS programmer/analyst might not recognize as scripting or as even practical for all I know. I think I'll categorize these as "geoprocessing for hipsters". I don't usually begin coding in this way, but often arrive here after a few iterations.

If you find these rubrics fun and/or pedagogical, jump on in.

Station Identification

Sean Gillies — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Since March 2005, this is the blog of Sean Gillies.

These are my words only and not those of my employer, coworkers, family, or friends. I have agendas, but no particular strategy. I write when I can about whatever I find interesting, and it will be more of the same this year: commercial free observations, thinking out loud, big blocks of code, and lessons learned. I published 56 posts in 2012, up from 47 in 2011, and hope to bump the quantity and quality up again in 2013. Comments are welcome, a privilege of having a modest number of always thoughtful readers, but please do read my comments policy.

The idea to post a yearly station identification comes from John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

Peviously: 2012.