I’ve created a new git repository to hold bits and bobs of my code. I’m still looking around to see what I can put in, so it’s a little thin right now.

Among other things, this allows me to finally make a gallery of page designs that never were. At present the archive begins in late 02001. I began writing HTML earlier than that — sometime in 01999 — but those files may be gone forever. There are a number of designs that are missing because they were part of custom blogging engines. I’ll work on creating a plain-HTML version of those so they can be shared too.

I’m currently planning on at least one more repository, to store my custom CSS that I use to clean up stuff like YouTube. Hopefully that’ll be up within a few days.

I’ve copied and pasted most of the stuff I’ve published here into Markdown files that are published in the GitHub directory for this site. As noted in the README over there, I’ve used a few tricks to capture most of the information that I’m using in the background here at Tumblr, in case I move to another service (which I’m almost guaranteed to do eventually). I should figure out a way to record publishing time — right now only the day is saved, so things would restore out-of-order. I don’t know if any of this stuff that I’m writing or pushing or whatever will be useful to anyone other than me, but if you want it, here it is.

The footer tells about how everything here is licensed with Creative Commons, and includes a link to the site’s repository. CC doesn’t require that I publish everything as source; I don’t know if even the GFDL requires that. Like I said, though, it gives me an option for the future to move or restore from backups; it also happens to make it easier to share my work. Benefits for everybody!

Today I began work on a new Tumblr theme. I decided I’d start keeping everything related to the blog in GitHub, and develop ‘live’ by pushing CSS updates and working in the Tumblr editor. Great idea, but there’s a problem: trying to load the CSS file doesn’t work right. Most of the time there’s a delay of at least a minute before it loads, even when it’s already in my browser cache. In my cursory search I wasn’t able to find any mention by GitHub for or against using it as a file server. They evidently support it in some capacity since they launched ‘pages’; I may try to set up the needed files as a branch of some sort inside my page repository and see if I can fix it that way. It’d give me a much shorter URL, if nothing else!

So I decided I’d poke around to see if my domain registrar offered anything useful. Turns out I get some free hosting and I can add subdomains and so on, but at the moment they don’t seem to be working. It could be a DNS propagation thing.

While I was involved with that, I discovered I also have a free email address for my domain. With a little fiddling I got that set up and now it’s a transparent alias for my previous primary address at Gmail; everything directed to it is automatically forwarded, and I can easily send as it via Gmail’s web interface or Mail.app.

Now there’s the bother of gradually changing my email address across dozens of websites… but at least it’ll be done if I ever move off Gmail.