The contradiction tsunamis has continued all of yesterday, and this morning the same. There are signs it could turn violent, with some rather aggressive motorbike gang stalkers this morning hurling abuse while revving their engine as they drive past. They’ve also positioned half empty large plastic cups rather obviously on the garbage bin on which the lid has been left open. That combined with the motorbikes this morning is a way they are intimidating me around what happened last year. They are alluding to the assault. Yeah it’s very horse’s head in your bed. A lot of what goes on around here has a very horse’s head in your bed vibe. All very funny until it’s not.
On the plus side, I found a bit of piece and quiet yesterday morning to refactor the RSS feed code. I think I already managed to fix the bug, which I have to wait till build minutes reset to test. But the whole code structure was really bothering me. I originally wrote it under very difficult conditions, that’s literally always the way with the RSS code, for whatever reason. The end result was I put almost all the logic in the template, but there are a bunch of other primitives that I can use. It just hasn’t been that obvious how to do it. The RSS feed generation is different to most other rendering because instead of 1 template rendering 1 to many output files, it’s sort of reversed. You have to render lots of templates into a single output file. And I’m also using a library to create the feed.
Because of that and because of several cludges that are in the code because of all this, it hasn’t been at all obvious what a better way would look like. There was always something obscuring the way forward. Well I think I’ve cracked the problem. With the benefit of hindsight it seems a bit obvious. Essentually it requires moving some preparation code to another place and modifying how each rss item is rendered. That might not mean much to anyone, but essentially it unknots the hairball that was the RSS code and makes it all nice and well structured and a pleasure to read and reason about.
I’ve done about 1/2 of it yesterday, hoping to get the other 1/2 done over the next few days if worldo allows. Of course that’s easier said than done because as is always the case when I go anyway near the RSS code, starvation and harassment isn’t far away. I wish I was joking. This really is no joke. It’s fucking insane.
Everything is so much more difficult when you are hungry.
Another bit of good news, I already prepared the newsletter, that’s a relief because I'm very low on energy today. But it’s not a good relief because I was forced to prepare it early because the week has been so narly. That means the issue is lower quality than usual. It’s piece meal, with bits added in fits and starts, as the universe allowed, and since it’s been a week of stop start race conditions, the newsletter has that in it too. And frankly that makes me sad because there is so much good content but my newsletter isn’t able to present it in an appealing way. It just feels like a few small piles of unloved garbage. #