Sal's Blog

Moved the blog from 11ty to Hugo

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:26:18 -0400

What should you do when you’re busy and have been spending too much time on your blog lately? Why, dive head first into a completely unnecessary SSG migration, of course!

I had Hugo on the brain last night for somewhat valid, somewhat flimsy reasons:

I used Hugo in the past and liked it.
11ty’s fast, but Hugo’s wicked fast.
I’ve been writing more Golang code lately.
While I’m fine with JavaScript and enjoy TypeScript, relying on npm feels dirty these days with all the supply-chain attacks. Hugo is a single, batteries-included binary that does not rely on third-party packages.

With these thoughts in mind, I dipped a toe back into the Hugo pond this morning, liked the feel of it, and before long was wild-eyed and neck-deep in migration. It’s now about 3:50 pm, and I think most of the core stuff is working in Hugo.

... Read the full post on Sal's

Belated welcome to Blaugust

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wasn’t sure I was going to say anything about Blaugust because I’m already posting a lot lately, but why the heck not. So, a belated welcome to Blaugust 2026! From the intro:

If you’re new to blogging, it’s a great opportunity to meet many cool people, get help with starting up your own website, and participate in a cool community project. If you’re a blogging veteran, it’s just the push to dust off the old site and get back into the ring again. Overall, it’s just a nice event that reinvigorates the community and helps folks not just build up a habit of writing but also form connections with other people in the sphere.
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Cursive

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I mentioned that I was going to try following Neal Stephenson’s advice and learn to write in cursive. I stuck with it for almost a whole afternoon.

Is that good?

Practicing proper cursive — in my case, as directed by the Palmer Method — massively slowed down my writing. And the product looked like shit because I was bad at it. Then I realized the Palmer Method opens the rabbit hole of “whole arm movement,” where you use your arm to move the pen rather than your hand. Apparently this can take years of practice to master.

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Re: productivity mirage

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Alex’s post, The Productivity Mirage (HN discussion here):

I remember this legendary software engineer at Facebook. His name is Bob. Bob is a prolific engineer – he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups (among other things). He was also a hackathon legend, delivering hit after hit.

At the time I was a massive productivity nerd. I had a custom Vim setup with my own syntax highlighting and snippets for Hack (Facebook’s dialect of PHP). My elaborate setup involved tmux over mosh with custom hphpd shortcuts and fancy git aliases.
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Re: Bubbles, upvotes, web interlinking

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Brace for metablogging. Sorry / not sorry.

I’m responding to two good posts I found this week:

Brennan’s Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!, which linked me to
Coyote’s Bubbles is a New Way of Recreating Old Problems.

Because I’m a proper smoothbrain, I never realized what the “bubbles” of bubbles.town refer to. The site’s footer currently reads, “Good stuff bubbles up.” As in, the “good” blog posts are made discoverable via upvotes.

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Thoughts in progress: jj and my homelab

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My jj experiment is going well

As mentioned, I’ve been trying jj lately, and I’m beginning to see the light. Or at least some of it. Here are a few key changes I’ve noticed.

{% aside %} Disclaimer: I am mediocre at git and a total beginner at jj. This post captures my thoughts as I learn. It’s not meant to be any sort of guide or advice. {% endaside %}

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Adding an
element with 11ty

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For some time now, I’ve been wanting to try using <aside> elements in this blog for … asides, I guess. You know, those “btw…” sorts of comments, but in cases where a footnote feels like too much faff.

Thanks to the neighborhood crows, who were particularly escalated this morning at 5:45 right outside my bedroom window, I found myself with some extra time to devote to this. In case it’s helpful to anyone, here’s how I dunnit.

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Creating tasks from iOS Safari vs. Chrome

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I know the indie blogosphere detests Chrome, but bear with me.

Or don’t. 🤷‍♂️

Safari was buggin’ out on my iPhone one day so I tried using Chrome for a bit. I soon learned that Safari has a big advantage in one of my common workflows.

In mobile Safari, when I select text, then use the share action for the current webpage (not just the selected text), and share to either Todoist or Things, the resulting task includes three helpful things: the page URL, the page title, and the selected text.

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/uses updates: Neovim, VSCode, Things, Todoist (plus the page actually works now)

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fixed the page

I just now realized that my /uses page has been invisible because /uses has been redirecting to my old one from 2024.

Whoopsie daisy. I probably did that on purpose when I moved my blog and proceeded to forget all about it when creating the new page.

Fixed.

The changes

Neovim to VSCode

Gonna lose some nerd-cred here, but…

The text-editor section used to include Neovim as my primary editor and Zed for heavier coding (less fuss, just works). Now it just has VSCode.

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Em dashes are amazing

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Saw this on HN this morning: Em dashes are fucking amazing.

Excerpt:

I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.
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Trying jj with this blog's git repo

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Current status: I’m trying Jujutsu, aka jj, to manage this blog’s git repo.

I’ve used git since … 2011-ish? I tried jj once before but assumed it’s not worth the learning curve. My use cases are so simple these days, as I use git as a personal backup and sync tool rather than for collaboration with other people, which is where things get more interesting.

But I recently learned my company’s Engineering department is moving to it. That made me stop and think … and ask Gemini if I should bother. Gemini told me:

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Neal Stephenson on writing by hand

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not every day that one of my favorite authors writes about one of my favorite topics, so my brain did a little “ooh ooh ooh!” dance when I saw this post from Neal Stephenson show up on HN:

Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here’s how to do it.

This is timely for me, as I’ve been experimenting with writing by hand on paper, on my iPad, and, most recently, on my Supernote Manta.

... Read the full post on Sal's

papernews

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to read (and annotate!) more stuff on my Supernote Manta. Along those lines, papernews (found via Baty) looks cool.

I love the idea! It’s not quite for me, though. First, due to limited time and brains, I’m very selective about what I want to spend time reading. I don’t want a dump of everything from a given source. I’m more likely to print a single article to PDF, send it to my Manta, and then spend an entire lunch hour reading it and marking it up. I did this the other day and loved it.

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Two multi-cursor commands I should use more often

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I love multiple cursors. Thank you, Sublime Text, for delivering them unto us all those years ago.

Here are two commands I’ve known about but haven’t properly built into muscle memory. I’ll cite the VSCode-specific names and shortcuts, but I imagine most editors with multiple cursors will have their own equivalents.

Command-Shift-L: Select All Occurences of Find Match. This will select every occurence of the currently selected text. Or, if there’s no active selection, it will select every occurence of the word under the cursor. This is awesome for making rapid edits across an entire file.

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Hasty IndieWeb thoughts; bad roads as filters

sal@sals.place (Sal) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently skimmed through Andros Fenollosa’s post, I joined the IndieWeb, here’s what I learned. It’s a good post.

I’m on board with the IndieWeb principles: “owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.” And this blog and my process with it seem to follow what Adam Newbold describes in his post, Hardcore IndieWeb: write your content on your hard drive and upload it to your hosting provider of choice, which ideally sits behind your own domain name.

... Read the full post on Sal's

Sal's Blog

Moved the blog from 11ty to Hugo

Belated welcome to Blaugust

Cursive

Re: productivity mirage

Re: Bubbles, upvotes, web interlinking

Thoughts in progress: jj and my homelab

My jj experiment is going well

Adding an element with 11ty

Creating tasks from iOS Safari vs. Chrome

/uses updates: Neovim, VSCode, Things, Todoist (plus the page actually works now)

Fixed the page

The changes

Neovim to VSCode

Em dashes are amazing

Trying jj with this blog's git repo

Neal Stephenson on writing by hand

papernews

Two multi-cursor commands I should use more often

Hasty IndieWeb thoughts; bad roads as filters

Adding an
element with 11ty