Currently, it is seven in the morning and I have yet to go to sleep. I have been wrestling. It feels as though I have been wrestling with God, but I have just been wrestling with web design. I think that is actually somehow worse.

I cannot believe how many issues I've been having with such a simple little weblog. To start, I'm pretty impressed with myself that I managed to automatically sync my omg.lol repo on GitHub so I don't have to manually use the GUI on the site to constantly write and update. The cost? I've done around fifty commits today alone, you know, with the wrestling.

I don't really know what's going on underneath the hood of the omg.lol weblog system. It seems like such a simple static site generator, but I can't tell if there are glitches server-side or if I'm just an incompetent coder. Like, for example, I was writing up quite a nice post template (hopefully you can see it as you read this) but for whatever reason, the literal strings "post template" would appear before the <!DOCTYPE ...> HTML markup of the page, like it was putting the text that was meant to be YAML or some equivalent on the page. I resorted to using JavaScript to just remove the text from view, like sweeping a massive pile of garbage underneath a rug and pretending the bulge in the rug is decorative and that having "Quirks Mode" enabled by default was intentional and on purpose.

The rest of the issues seem to have taken me less time and pain, thankfully. I had a weird spacing issue with my links in my sidebar, but then I realized it was because I made the spacing larger after auditing my site with Lighthouse and it telling me that the links were too close together for mobile use. (Can you tell I haven't slept?)

And then there was the light/dark toggle. For whatever reason, it would not work. I think it boiled down to my default being dark mode, and trying to toggle out of dark mode actually just toggled whatever the user's default was, so it was permanently stuck in dark mode. Terrible.

Hm, what else? Oh yeah, all of the pills/whatever you want to call them were missing their bottom border, because links were set to have a border-bottom of 0. I am not exactly sure why. Did I do that? Why would I do that? Was it a default config? Is it to not mix up the bottom-border with the underline of the link? It is baffling.

This is why I decided to get a bachelor's degree in English literature instead of computer science. I can wrestle with difficult questions and meaning and humanity far easier than HTML and CSS and JavaScript. This isn't even using one of the many horrifying frameworks or back-end technology whatsoever. I am a pauper, destitute in any sort of meaningful technical knowledge.

This is my cathartic lamentation. I think I will talk now about my writing process to take my mind off the great sadness of web development.

For the past month and a half, I would use my morning pages (750 words/3 pages written in less than 20 minutes each morning) to outline and draft an article (usually paywalled) to post on Medium. This was all fine and dandy, but it got so sterile and safe and measured. I have done so much academia and made so many well-sourced palatable essays for professors who merely want to hear you regurgitate what they think is true already.

It has been so wonderful to return back to form, to just write whatever the hell comes to me in my head. There is humour and silliness and by God, don't we need those things?

Anyways, there is still so much work to be done. I am honestly thinking that I abandon the omg.lol weblog altogether and just use the code I've made for it (because it is very nice actually, very cozy and accessible!) and transfer it over to Eleventy, where it will play nice and have so many more features. So tempting.

Update: I did it. You're reading this on brennan.day now, built with Eleventy and hosted on GitLab. The wrestling continues, but at least now I control the ring.