Automate All the Things!

I'm Lazy

I need to be creative, but the problem is that I'm also quite sloppy. I have a wealth of ideas sparking in my head, and I initiate many of them, but only a few ever reach completion. I struggle with committing to a project and seeing it through to the end.

Take this blog, for example. I've owned the domain lemniscata.com for 23 years now. A while back, I used the most affordable virtual private server available, pointed the domain there, configured Apache, PHP, MySQL, and all the web server components. And then, nothing. I shifted my focus to other things.

The previous version of this site was a simple image carousel featuring old photos of mine. It was hosted on the free 10-megabyte tier that comes bundled with domain registration through OVH. So, how can I fit a modern web content manager into 10 megabytes? It's impossible. The best alternative is to create it statically. Ten megabytes is still ample space for text, even considering HTML overhead.

I started my career crafting simple HTML pages with tables, long before the advent of the div tag, visual editors, or dynamic pages. Imagine that! And now, I want to return to that. No way.

Automation

Today, we live in the era of Python, Google, image, and video services. With minimal effort, I managed to build this site in just a few hours. I create a blog post in Markdown format using Ghostwriter, add some metadata to a Python file, and run the generate_html.py script. The entire web page is generated and ready for uploading.

Now, I plan to create another script to upload the content directly to the small 10-megabyte hosting space.

Conclusion

As I grow older, I become lazier. Ironically, my desire to create things is intensifying! I'm harnessing the power of all the tools at my disposal:

• Chat-GPT and Copilot
• Python
• Free hosting services

I'm utilizing these resources not only for this site but for everything I do with a computer, including paid work and my programming endeavors in my spare time.