Today I learned that it IS possible to make a relatively simple static site that has some automatic authentication built in to NGINX that will use a custom HTML file for the login page as opposed to the basic-auth prompt that gets so annoying.

I've finally gotten around to getting some basic configurations with my Listmonk mailing list system going. I got started with configurations for the Idaho 4-H Roundup podcast (did I mention I've started a podcast?), but now I'm also getting one started for my blog site. Here's how I added the HTML to get it working here.

I'm quickly approaching the mark of 50 blog posts, which is wonderful! But it also means that finding that "thing" I wrote some time ago is becoming an increasing challenge. So... I need to add search to my blog site. But how? It's a static site, after all, there's not really a "backend" to do the search functionality for me... Luckily, there's some wonderful folks who've written tooling to add just this functionality. Here's how I added it to my blog site!

What better way to learn, then by doing. That, after all, is the ethos of 4-H. The very esence of how 4-H teaches youth effective life-skills every day. This "photo upload app" that I've been working on relies on some of the newest, prettiest, fanciest web framework technologies available to make the common user-interaction experience very smooth so that youth may engage in digital activities easily, without having to learn new hoops to jump through. Still, it's being built for youth, by youth, so wouldn't it be disappointing if there weren't aspects that were clearly touched by youth? Clearly inspired by them? Sharing their energy and creativity?

We know that I don't like to do anything that computers can do for me. We also know that I like Python, and am not a huge fan of Java. So how am I going to get PlantUML integrated into my blog without actually needing to install the Java packages? Let me show you...