Making Some Upgrades

March 9, 2025

I saw this post yesterday where Hamatti shows how to group your posts by date in your blog listing. I thought that would be nice to have on my own site. Now, I use hugo which, as it turns out, supports this basically out of the box with Pages.GroupByDate. It took longer to read the documentation than to add it to my site. Nice!

While I had my sleeves rolled up and my hands dirty in my site’s guts, I thought I’d try and add a feature I’ve been wanting for a while, inspired by https://pluralistic.net: a list of posts “on this day” in past years. It’ll be pretty sparse for now, I haven’t been blogging long enough to have good coverage of the year, but that’s one of the cool things about blogs. They are truly long term projects. Some features are for today. Some are for ten years from now.

Anyway, I’m not much enjoying all the mucking around in hugo templating it’s taking; this stuff is hard to debug. It took me about three hours to get things working in about ten lines of code. I am not too familiar with this language, so a lot of that time was spent just paging through a dozen tabs of documentation. It’s very likely an LLM could have done the job significantly faster, but I would not have learned nearly as much.

And one good thing about taking time to do a task is that you have time to think about that task. There is perhaps a disadvantage to doing this automatically, in that part of the point is to remember and make connections with where and who I was in the past. This way I don’t need to think about it or even be aware of it. But on the other hand, if I were to do it manually I would never have a chance of remembering to do it at all. There’s a tradeoff. There always is.

I have more things on the todo list for this site, but this was a nice weekend’s worth of work.