A developer personal journal

I had split this into two entries, one for the purpose itself and this one more about the technical side of things once I discussed why this blog is what is it.

At the end of my thought process I decided that I will make posts via a CMS called shellCMS that is a fork from bashblog but instead of using markdown it will let you use html, so as stated by shellCMS creator it will allow you to use your favorite WYSIWYG editor.

So I started then to look through the shellCMS documentation, pros and cons, finally I decided to give it a try, so I went ahead and downloaded the package from the author's website blog post. A very small package less than 1Mb uncompressed (It reminded me back in the 1.44mb era of floppy disks), so it is pretty portable, I had Ubuntu installed on my system so no issues from that side as it is intented to work with linux bash.

Until that everything seemed pretty smooth. I jump into the demo folders and go inside the www/news path and go over the cms_config folder opened the config file, checked the basics of the config file. I did not have seamonkey composer installed, so I made a tweak to change the editor to vscode just to see the tags of the base on the template. Then tried to start shellcms by doing ./shellcms www/news post with high expectatives. But was received by an error:

The ... notation there is just the path to the shellcms installation folder. Well my first impression was "Oh its reading the wrong config file" and went to a folder 1 level up to the config file in the www folder, changed it and tested again, same issue. I Thought that it was that some weird issue with visual studio code was happening so switched to gedit then to helix and then to vi nothing worked.

At that point I just decided ok the application is complaining about geany, I want to post to my blog and its not time to be stubborn lets install geany. And after a sudo apt-get install after I had a pretty simple IDE that it wasn't WYSIWYG but at that point I wanted to see the cms working, but no luck either, I verified the documentation about the requirements for the editor, the instance awareness that it was required before trying to use shellcms. But there was no switch, no file nothing that could make the shellCMS editor to start. So I did the only thing I could ask the developer of the software in a Puppy Linux Discussion Forum Post on the EasyOS category. After discussion I ended inspecting the bash file itself. And oh no I had passed the boundary, the path of no return for a developer.

You could check in the link to the discussion forum the details on the issue, but at the end of the day there was a variable overwrite that stoped the shell from reading the variable on the config file, and then there was an issue with the validation of editors with instance aware switches, they will require a solution like suggested in the thread of using a wrapper script for geany or just to install seamonkey. But at that point I had been already triggered by that little monster-like bug that was going against the documentation

Let's be clear I consider myself a senior developer so I am not afraid of touching someone else's code. I knew for a fact that it was not an intended error and as always, you could overlook some details and you will not expect someone to use all the options besides the suggested path. So I went ahead and fix it. I made a change on the bash script so it could support editors with their respective "new instance" syntax. Then I forgot about the root cause beign that there was an internal overwrite of the configuration file in favor of the initialization of the variables at the begining of the script.

Now after sending the update to the software developer, the thrilling experience of fixing bugs in this software and just learning something new drove me to another path, the path of tweaking.

I decided to modify shellcms to support other custom styles besides just simple css, my next target was to make shellCMS to support bulma, and then I had a very different monster ahead one thing is fix a bug another is to change the template of a cms that was coded inside the cms code itself. So I decided to create a fork of shellCMS and create shellCMS_bulma it is called like the original software because it is not yet a very fundamental and total change to the original ideas logic of the original cms. But after some work I was able to edit my first post and get a very good result. The only tradeoff its the size of the bulma.css file but it fit my needs pretty well so I was happy with the result.

So it was very good excercise and journal to be here posting to my website from my very basic yet pretty customizable software. For shellcms_bulma I encourage to use a text editor or IDE like vscode, geany, helix so you could use all the bells and whistles from bulma css framework when creating a post it just abstract enough of the html syntax to be good to use.

I will finally comment about the infrastructure, as you had already seen this is a static website so basic infrastucture is needed but nothing special at all, you could check Github pages or cloudflare pages or Azure Web apps to see more about hosting, but almost any platform of cloud could host a static website, even you could with your computer (that is a more advanced topic that I will not cover in this post). I just grab the files and uploaded to the server and it was all, no pipelines, no build time, no waiting. And it worked pretty well at the first try, so my adventure had a nice end.

For the foreseeable future I plan to port shellcms_bulma to windows powershell just for fun and to enable windows users to use this software (when you travel its highly likely to have a windows pc near than a linux one so I prefer to give it a try)