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One thing we all dread is mundane work of getting started, and all the hoops it takes to get going. This year I want to post more often and I am taking some steps towards making it easier for myself to just get started. When I start a new post I need to cd into my blog directory, start neovim in a markdown file with a clever name, copy some frontmatter boilerplate, update the post date, add tags, a description, and a cover. Todo List for starting a post # frontmatter template Title slug tags date cover description create markdown file open in neovim Lets Automate this # This aint no proper cli # hot and fast As with many thing running behind the scenes on this site, I am the one and only user, I have limited time, so this is going to be a bit hot and fast. Let’s create a file called new-post. start the script new-post 👆 Works on my machine If this were something that had more users than me I would probably use something like click, but for this I want to get it done quick and avoid any…

In python data science we often will reach for pandas a bit more than necessary. While pandas can save us so much there are times where there are alternatives that are much simpler. The itertools more-itertools` are full of cases of this. This post is a walkthrough of me solving a problem with rather than reaching for a for loop, or pandas. I am working on a one-line-link expander for my blog. I ended up doing it, just by modifying the markdown with python. I first split the post into lines with, then look to see if the line appears to be just a link. One more safety net that I wanted to add was to check if there was whitespace around the line, this could not simply be done in a list comprehension by itself. I need just a bit of knowledge of the surrounding lines, enter. simplified rendering function # I have a function that will check to see if the line should be expanded, then render the correct template. Fist step is to check if the line contains no spaces and starts with, if it doe…

This is episode 1 of the Waylon Walker Audio experience, posts from waylonwalker.com {.hoverlink} in audio form. So I have had this idea for awhile to add audio to my blog posts. The idea partly comes from the aws blog, if you have ever been on their blog you will have noticed that they have a voiced by amazon polly section. What to Expect # Honestly I don’t know this is all new to me and I dont have much to go off of. For now its a test that may or may not work out. I will say that the time that I have available for clean audio is a bit limited so expect these to come out in batches as I get time to go back and record. What Not to Expect # One thing that makes the aws blog really hard to listen to is the robotic voice, I definitely don’t want that. This will be voiced by a real human, Me. At the same time written text doesn’t translate directly to audio well so don’t necessarily expect the audio to be word for word. Code blocks # There are a lot of code blocks in my blog, which don’t…

Inspired by discourse’s link expansion I am rolling out expansions for one line links on the blog waylonwalker. I was able to find a gatsby plugin gatsby-remark-embedder that expands one line links for social cards for popular platforms like twitter and YouTube through a repose from Kyle Mathews to my tweet. https://twitter.com/kylemathews/status/1329817928666005504 Use Cases # This covers a couple of use cases I have with very little effort. Twitter YouTube install # This was super quick and simple to setup, the only thing that was extra was to install the plugin as well as the. enable # Thats it, now I can embed tweets and YouTube videos by just leaving the link on a single line.

I wanted a super simple way to cross-link blog posts that require as little effort as possible, yet still looks good in vanilla markdown in GitHub. I have been using a snippet that puts HTML into the markdown. While this works, it’s more manual/difficult for me does not look the best, and does not read well as Goals for new card # The new card should be fully automated to expand with title, description, and cover image. Bonus if I am able to attach a comment behind it. fully automated card expansion Title description cover image Old Card # If you can call it a card 🤣. This card was just an image wrapped in an anchor tag and a paragraph tag. I found this was the most consistent way to get an image narrower and centered in both GitHub and dev.to. The key here is that I have to put the HTML into the markdown. It looks a bit dirty while editing and quite frankly it’s a pain to deal with. New Card # My first eight years as a working professional. First step # My first attempt was to make my…