passthejoe by Steven Rosenberg

Using the Obsidian notetaking app to write posts for Zola

2026-05-19T00:00:00+00:00
I've given quite a few notetaking apps a tryout in my quest to both find a smoother workflow for writing posts for static site generators like Zola and Hugo, and now it's Obsidian's turn. Or it's my turn at using Obsidian.
I did leave Obsidian for pretty much the end of my "journey" of trying every notetaking app I could find in Flathub.
Why did I leave Obsidian to the end? I've tried to prioritize apps that are coded in more traditional-to-linux/unix ways (i.e. not Electron or other Javascript cross-platform frameworks).
There even is a plugin to export Obsidian posts to blogs such as Hugo, Hexo and a few others. Like Obsidian itself, the plugin seems very complicated, with a lot of configuration options. The plugin also didn't work for me with the TOML front matter for a Zola post.
I didn't give up so easily. I found the Enhancing Export</a> plugin, which seemed promising.
The export appeared to go well. I got an .md</code> file exactly where I wanted it. However, all of the brackets in my TOML front matter were escaped with backslashes.
Instead of:
[taxonomies]</code>
it was:
\[taxonomies\]</code>
Why is it doing that? Who wants this?
I could spend many hours trying to figure out how to get it to export to go the way I want, but I'm not excited enough about the app to make the effort. If there were another plugin, or native functionality (which this really should be) to do the export the right way, that would be nice.
Note: This entry was copy/pasted into and exported out of Iotas</a> because that is one of the apps that exports the right way out of the box.


Is Standard Notes worth $90 to $120 a year?
2026-05-09T00:00:00+00:00
Right now I'm in working on this post in Standard Notes</a>, one of the free-to-paid cross-platform notetaking apps.</p>
You can export a text file and give it any suffix you want — even .md</code>, but this is a free/paid app, and you can only "see" Markdown rendered if you go to the first paid tier, called Productivity, which is $90. The Professional tier at $120 — a 33% increase over Productivity.</p>
I like the app. Without a paid membership, it's pretty basic. And despite the pay-to-play nature of most of the features that take it beyond the basic "it's a text editor with autosave," the app</a> is open source under the AGPL 3.0 license. On the project's home page</a>, under "Standard Notes," it says, "Powered by Proton," which I think refers to the Proton Native framework</a> to create desktop applications using the same syntax as React Native, and not carrying a whole browser along with it like an Electron app.</p>
Not only is the desktop app open-source, but so is the server, which is billed as "fully self-hostable."</p>
So on the surface, this seems like a better way to get a cross-platform, "native" desktop app. Better than Electron, I guess, though I'm not an expert. There's still a bit of a delay when starting the app on my 9-year-old HP laptop. It takes about 12 seconds to launch on this hardware. It could be better for you. Could be worse. But the app is very responsive once loaded.</p>
In addition to the desktop app, there's also a web app at https://app.standardnotes.com/, as well as apps for Android and iOS.</p>
In April I signed up for a free account to see what I could do with Standard Notes? And now that it's May, I got an email from Standard Notes reminding me about what the app includes for free accounts:</p>

Your free account comes with standard features like end-to-end encryption, multiple-device sync, and two-factor authentication.</p>
</blockquote>
Then it reminded me about what I'm missing by not subscribing for $90-$120/year.</p>
Right now I'm in this note and wanted to search for a word. I couldn't figure it out. Ctrl-F doesn't do it. It turns out that search isn't available in text</em> notes, the only kind you can create with the Free plan. You need to use Super Notes</em> in order to make them searchable</a>, and that's a paid feature.</p>
With most of the desktop notetaking apps I'm using, including Iotas and QOwnNotes, I can search for something in all the notes.</p>
At least I was able to switch to dark mode. I can also give a note any name I want, and it will export with that name as the file name. All I have to do is replace .txt</code> with .md</code>. So for static-site blogging with Zola and Hugo, this is a solid choice.</p>
The Standard Notes app also has a Command Palette. Is it related to the last app with this feature that I tried? This must be a feature from Obsidian, or one of the other paid notetaking apps because I've seen it a few times now.</p>
You can type Markdown in Standard Notes, but it doesn't render. Markdown rendering is available, but it costs.</p>
At the risk of repeating myself, here are Standard Notes' three available plans:</p>

Free</li>
Productivity: $90 per year</li>
Professional: $120 per year</li>
</ul>
If you commit to 5 years, you get a "break":</p>

Productivity: $299 for 5 years</li>
Professional: $349 for 5 years</li>
</ul>
If I loves this tool above all others, I'd pay. But I'm not sure.</p>
In addition to Markdown rendering, things like the ability to create checklists, spreadsheets, keep a daily journal, create folders and use a "Web Clipper" to save web pages as notes are all part of the $90 package. It's not a bad price, but it's hard to justify, especially if I can't test out all the features beforehand. Refunds are available within 14 days for the $90 Productivity plan and 90 days for the $120 Professional plan.</p>
Mimiri Notes</a> is at least somewhat comparable and only charges $12 per year. Standard Notes is objectively a better product, but is it $72 per year better?</p>
The problem</em> is that in that time, I've been exploring using a hosted Nextcloud account for notes and note sync. I have a free account with TheGood.Cloud</a> for the next six months, and after that it's only $28 a year. It doesn't have the "advanced" notetaking features of Standard Notes, but it's also a lot cheaper and allows me to use other apps on Android and desktop for notetaking, calendar and general file sync.</p>
I'm not ready yet to boot Standard Notes out of the running as my notetaking solution, but I don't know if I need what it's offering, and $90 is above what I'm willing to spend as an individual for this service.</p>


Red Hat employee wanted to leave US. Company said no. Now key GNOME components are unmaintained
2026-05-02T00:00:00+00:00
The Red Hat employee who created some of the software that is critical to the GNOME desktop environment wanted to leave the U.S. and move to France. The company said no. He quit and moved anyway.</p>
Christian Hergert announced in February 2026 that due to his family situation and the current government, he wanted to leave the U.S. for France</a>.</p>
He's worried about his family during President Trump's crackdown on immigration, legal, illegal and otherwise. And he wanted to leave the country because of it.</p>
He asked Red Hat to allow him to transfer to France. The company declined.</p>
Christian's work is a huge part of the GNOME desktop. Most GNOME-based distributions have moved to the Ptyxis terminal and GNOME Text Editor, two apps he developed and maintained.</p>
Nearly three months later, nobody apparently has taken on the maintenance</a>, let alone the development of these critical apps.</p>
A lot of people maintain apps or packages as part of their day job and somehow continue doing so after they leave the company's employ. I don't expect that from Christian, or anybody.</p>
Ptyxis</a> helped make it easy to use containers created with Distrobox, Toolbox and other technologies. I'd definitely call this terminal app critical in the age of immutable/atomic distros.</p>
GNOME Text Editor</a> is a great app. Along with Ptyxis, I use it daily. The Text Editor isn't packed with features, but it runs great and looks great: It's built with GTK4.</p>
The former default text editor, GEdit</a>, is also excellent, and it has additional (yet poorly documented) features that hadn't yet come to the newer Text Editor. That's OK. GEdit was never updated to GTK4, maybe because GNOME Text Editor appeared to "succeed it" in the default of most GNOME distros.</p>
So whether or not the GNOME Text Editor and Ptyxis have maintainers, they are still being maintained</em>. Even GEdit has a new release for GNOME 50.</p>
Is this a tempest in a teacup, or a real concern?</p>


From Timothée Ravier: What’s new for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora 44
2026-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
Fedora 44</a> is out, and for the past few releases, I haven't been able to figure out if anything</em> new has been done with the Atomic distros, including Silverblue and Kinoite (and Sway, Budgie and Cosmic).</p>
For F44, Timothée Ravier, who works at Red Hat and is the Atomic Desktops Maintainer, has posted What’s new for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora 44</a>.</p>
Things that are of interest to me:</p>

New, unified documentation</a></li>
GNOME 50 and Plasma 6.6</li>
He recommends the Universal Blue</a> distros. I use Bluefin</a> and appreciate all the tech from Fedora as well as the spirit of cooperation.</li>
</ul>
TBH, I wish the list were longer, but it is what it is. I could see myself back with Silverblue or Kinoite, though Bluefin is running so well that it would be hard to switch.</p>


Iotas and Nextcloud Notes sync
2026-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
One of the key features of the Iotas</a> notetaking app is the ability to sync with Nextcloud Notes</a>.</p>
I started a free-for-now Nextcloud account at https://thegood.cloud</a> to test this. Free</em> is a pretty good price for a 2 GB hosted Nextcloud account, and if I decide to stick with TheGood.Cloud after my 180-day trial, the service costs €23.88 per year for 10 GB. That's $28.11 USD. Not bad for a whole year. Unless I decide to start hosting some heavy duty files, I'll never get close to 10 GB. I can't even see getting to 1 GB.</p>
Once I got the Nextcloud account established, I went to Iotas and set up Nextcloud Sync. I was already logged in to TheGood.Cloud's web interface, and the sync immediately worked. I had the same notes in Iotas and Nextcloud.</p>
For most regular notes, including to-do lists, Nextcloud Notes is great. Writing and editing notes can be done in the Web interface as well as the Nextcloud and separate Nextcloud Notes</a> Android apps. It all works.</p>
The Nextcloud Notes Android app works a bit better for its own subset of Nextcloud than the overall Netxcloud app. I have both on the phone.</p>
And with all my notes in Iotas, I can export the individual Markdown-formatted notes to my Zola</a> blog's content directory on my laptop and then build and deploy the site. It would be the same for Hugo</a> with different front matter.</p>
After spending a few weeks looking at notetaking apps, I wasn't sure I needed syncing, but so far I'm doing quite a bit of writing on my phone. To that end, I found my old Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Both had severe battery corrosion, and the bin they went. It didn't matter. I'm using the phone and ... my fingers.</p>
When it comes to things like to-do lists, it's very</em> convenient to be able to access them on and sync them to mobile. Of course you can do this with Google Keep or other paid apps like Obsidian and Standard Notes, but there's a nice degree of flexibility with Nextcloud. You can use a hosted Nextcloud account, like I'm doing, or stand up your own Nextcloud server.</p>
The more I test the sync between Nextcloud's web view, mobile apps and my local notetaking apps, the more impressed I am with how well it works.</p>
In addition to blog posts and to-do lists, I'm also using the Notes app to save URLs I find when I'm on the phone. I just share a web page into Notes, and I can write about it later. I wish there was a way to do this with Nextcloud on the desktop.</p>
The main</em> problem I'm having with Iotas and Nextcloud Notes is about the rendering of Zola blog front matter</a>. I'm using tabs (which generally manifest themselves in my editors as spaces</em>) to preserve the TOML formatting, and Nextcloud Notes tends to strip out the spaces and some of the linefeeds. I haven't quite figured out this issue just yet, but I'm thinking about it.</p>


Why is it so hard (or impossible) to get a clean Markdown export out of Obsidian and Standard Notes?
2026-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
What's the deal with exporting Markdown files out of two of the most popular notetaking apps, Obsidian and Standard Notes?</p>
Obsidian</a> can't (or more accurately won't) export an .md</code> file from the base system, and none of the plugins I've tried can do it right, which for me means without added escapes preceding the brackets that's are in my blog posts' TOML front matter.</p>
Standard Notes</a> doesn't even allow an export with the free plan.</p>
Meanwhile Nextcloud</a> offers file exports (in the form of downloads</em> via the Files app) just like the Linux desktop apps I've been using: Iotas</a>, QOwnNotes</a> and Folio</a>. And the files are ready to go into a static site generator, which in my case is Zola</a>.</p>


QOwnNotes and Iotas sync with Nextcloud in two different ways
2026-04-30T00:00:00+00:00
I just found out that QOwnNotes</a> doesn't handle file sync with Nextcloud</a> in the same way as Iotas</a>.</p>
Instead, QOwnNotes relies on the Nextcloud desktop app</a> to sync the Markdown files generated by QOwnNotes with those on the Nextcloud server.</p>
I've already been thinking of testing the Nextcloud app, even though it's not needed for Iotas, which does the sync on its own with flat files on the Nextcloud side and an SQLite database for Iotas.</p>
I'd still like to see how well Nextcloud sync works. A reliable, Dropbox-like sync system would be pretty nice. Until recently, I had no idea that sync — or a separate app that does it — was even part of Nextcloud.</p>
Even if I get sync working for QOwnNotes and Nextcloud, I don't think that Nextcloud will recognize the tags that QOwnNotes can give to notes, though that would be nice.</p>
Despite the hurdle of syncing with Nextcloud, some of the things I appreciate about QOwnNotes are:</p>

Notes are stored in plain text files instead of a database</li>
Notes can be stored in nested folders</li>
Notes can be further categorized with multiple tags</li>
</ul>
In contrast, this is the situation for Iotas:</p>

Notes are stored in a SQLite database. They only "become" actual files if you export them.</li>
Notes can have a single category</em>. They can't have multiple categories, and there are no tags or folders, though a Category in Iotas mirrors a folder in Nextcloud.</li>
</ul>


Iotas is a GNOME Circle notetaking app that is a pretty good fit for writing blog posts
2026-04-29T00:00:00+00:00
I originally wrote this post a few weeks ago, and since then Iotas has been updated to resolve a bug that caused the app to crash when exporting a file. With that fix and a couple of small tweaks to Iotas' Flatpak sandbox and app permissions, everything is working a lot better. That makes Iotas a contender, along with QOwnNotes and Folio, for my go-to app for static-site blog posts, general notetaking and list-making.</em></p>
The rewritten review starts here:</em></p>
Iotas</a> is as good an app as any for writing notes</em>. And after an update from the developer and couple of extremely easy fixes on the user side, I got the app to successfully export a Markdown</em> file, both into the app's Flatpak sandbox</em> and the rest of my /home</code> directory.</p>
With the bug fix and tweaks in place, Iotas is a true contender for writing posts for static blogs as well as overall notetaking and to-do checklists. At first glance, it seems like a simple app that draws on GUI elements already present in many other GNOME apps, and it kind of is that. But in a way, that's what makes it so good. There are a lot of things that developers can pull from the GTK toolkit, and Iotas manages to make an app with a familiar look and feel that is just different enough to fill a critical gap in the overall GNOME ecosystem for a notetaking app.</p>
There are two "tiers" of official</em> GNOME apps: GNOME Core</a> for the really official</em> ones, and GNOME Circle</a> for those at the level below that. Iotas is a GNOME Circle app. There is no GNOME Core app for notetaking in case you were wondering. I was.</p>
Iotas is distributed as a Flatpak, which is how I install most things in Bluefin</a> (and Aeon</a> and Silverblue</a> before it). I couldn't find a traditional Fedora package, though there is a Debian package</a>. I just installed Iotas on my Debian 13 desktop, and even there I opted for the Flatpak because I want the latest version, which fixes the critical (to me) bug involving file exports.</p>
The notes in Iotas are stored in a SQLite database, not in plain text files like many other notetaking apps. This should theoretically make for a less cluttered setup since there won't be a large number files on your drive.</p>
However, if you want to move all of the notes to another app, or just to a folder on your system, you'll have to export them. More on that below. As I say above (and below), exporting</code> from a notes app is key to using it to write posts for my Zola</a> blog. The process is the same for a Hugo</a> blog — or any site that works with text files.</p>
And like almost all notetaking apps, Iotas automatically saves your work as you go. That's a feature I really like. I had no idea that notetaking apps pretty much all do this. Again, I'm in favor. You don't think you need</em> it, and it probably wouldn't work if you are relying on Git to provide version control for your site. I do not use version control for my sites, and it turns out that I find the auto-saving to be a very valuable feature.</p>
Iotas is a Markdown-friendly app. You can switch modes between writing mode and Markdown Render</strong>. Why not both at once? That's how Folio</a> does it. I'm generally OK with seeing the Markdown markup</em> code when I write and only seeing the rendered Markdown formatting when I want to. The way Iotas does Markdown Render mode looks great. But you can't do any editing there, the notable (and useful) exception being the ability to toggle checkboxes. More on that below</em>.</p>
I like Iotas' presentation and even the font. I would definitely use this font in another notetaking app.</p>
Iotas has a feature called focus mode</em>.  When turned on, it only highlights the sentence you're working on. I've used text editors that highlight the line you are working on, but I've never seen an app highlight only a single sentence. While I could see myself using this, it could be more distracting that not.</p>
The app is already pretty clean in terms of its UI. It's not at all crazy looking like some notetaking apps.</p>
When I first started using Iotas, it would crash when I tried to export a note. That was a bit of a deal-breaker. But since then, the export</code> bug has been fixed, but I still needed a little tweak to make it work.</p>
After I got the Flatpak update with the fix, I tried to export any of the available formats (PDF, ODT, HTML, MD), I got a message saying that the export failed, and there was an error opening my exported file.</p>
So what was going on? Iotas was trying to do the export to ~/.var/app/org.gnome.World.Iotas/data/iotas/exports</code>, and the exports</code> directory didn't exist in the Flatpak sandbox location on my system. I created the directory in Files/Nautilus, and the exports to it started working immediately.</p>
The Iotas Flatpak ships more locked down</em> than many other apps. Unless you allow it, the Iotas Flatpak won’t write to your home directory outside of its Flatpak sandbox. For my blog posting, I needed to export to the blog’s content directory. I used Flatseal to add permissions for my home directory, and then I could export to the folder containing the .md</code> files for my Zola blog</a>.</p>
In addition to exporting individual notes, you can select everything in Iotas and then batch-export all of the notes. I tested this, and it dropped a folder with all of my notes in the app's Flatpak sandbox (~/.var/app/org.gnome.World.Iotas/data/iotas/exports</code>). It took a tweak to get there (more info below), and I still couldn't get the batch export into any other folder, though it's easy enough to move the folder after the fact.</p>
Aside from writing blog posts, I’m looking for a notes app not just for general notes</em> but also for to-do lists</em>. And to that end, Iotas does checkbox lists very well. This example looks very nice in the app (trust me):</p>
How to evaluate a notetaking app</h2>


Does it support Markdown?</li>

Will it export a file?</li>

Can it do checkboxes?</li>

The checkboxes are actually checkable in rendering mode. I wish that QOwnNotes had this feature</li>
</ul>
It does it with the Markdown checkbox formatting: - [ ]</code> and crosses out the line when you "check" the box:  - [x]</code>, both in writing mode and Markdown Render mode.</p>
I'd almost just use this app for checkbox lists, even though not being able to edit in Markdown Render mode is not ideal.</p>
While I figured out exporting</code> from Iotas, there is no way to import</code> notes. That's not a feature I think I need, but it's nice to have</em>. There's also no way to link notes together like in other apps such as QOwnNotes</a> and Obsidian</a>. Again, is this a feature I personally need? I've used it but can get along without it.</p>
Another thing Iotas is missing is the ability to either copy a note or use a template to create a new one. I have generic TOML front matter for Zola that I need to use every time, and either making a template that includes it, or being able to easily copy a note that contains it would speed my workflow. As it is, to write a blog post, I first have to open the front-matter note, copy the contents and then start a new note with it pasted in. It's not arduous</em>, but also not as streamlined as it could be. I understand that the nature of these notetaking apps, which save your work automatically, make save</code> and save as</code> functionality a moot point. But still, I'd like to somehow integrate my boilerplate TOML into my workflow in a seamless way. QOwnNotes does it.</p>
Overall, I like the way Iotas works. I thought I wouldn't like an app that kept its notes in a database as opposed to flat files. But exporting works so well. The Markdown translates perfectly. You'd think that would be a given, but I've seen at least a couple of notetaking apps that can't manage to export without screwing it up. Iotas even makes setting the file name easy: It uses the note title and adds .md</code>. And since note titles are user-editable in Iotas, that works perfectly.</p>
I have another post on Iotas almost ready to go, and unless it repeats all of the information in this one, I'll be publishing it soon. So far, Iotas is my No. 1 notetaking app, and I'm not sure if something else can unseat it at this point, though QOwnNotes is close.</p>
Later:</strong> I'm still having some issues with formatting of the front matter  on blog posts created with Iotas. Or the problem could be that I'm also editing these notes/posts with Nextcloud Notes. I'm not sure yet.</p>
What could happen:</strong> I might end up using notetaking apps for lots of things that aren't</em> blog posting and just write posts BEFORE adding front matter. That might be the direction I take with this "project"</em>.</p>


Folio is a pretty basic notetaking app
2026-04-08T00:00:00+00:00
A lot of notetaking apps are pretty basic. They don't have extensive menus, and a lot of formatting options are in the toolbar.</p>
Folio</a> is</em> kind of basic, but it does two things that other basic notetaking apps don't do: Notes can have custom names and can be exported as Markdown files.</p>
The custom names are nice. But in Folio they aren't critical because you still have to type in a file name when exporting your .md</code> file. And if you do change a note name, there is a short yet annoying lag between the change and it appearing in the list of notes to the left.</p>
The ability to export a file is critical for my main use case, which is writing Markdown posts with TOML front matter for static site generators such as Zola and Hugo.</p>
Two of the things that pretty much all notetaking apps have in common are:</p>

The ability to work on multiple notes at the same time and easily switch between them</li>
Auto saving of notes</li>
</ul>
These two features are why I'm looking at notetaking apps as possible replacements for traditional text editors for the writing of blog posts. I want to streamline the writing process in terms of the computing mechanics</em>. Are notetaking apps actually helpful</em> in this task? I'm not sure yet.</p>
That slightly existential</em> question aside, Folio does these two core features as well as any app. But one thing Folio does better than most apps I've tried is the writing and display of Markdown. You could say that Folio is as much a Markdown editor as it is a notetaking app.</p>
Folio, which I installed as a Flatpak on my Bluefin Linux system, somehow became the system's default app for handling Markdown files. That's probably not an accident — or not much of one, anyway.</p>
Most of the basic Markdown formatting — headings, bold, italic, strikethrough, links and code blocks — can be accessed from the toolbar at the bottom of the app.</p>
For those who care about such things (including me), Folio is a native desktop app written in the Vala programming language</a>, which is a common (or at least encouraged) language that is object-oriented yet generages C code and uses the GObject type system. It is meant to be a close fit with the GNOME desktop environment.</p>
Recommended install methods for Folio are Flatpak</a>, Snap</a> and AppImage</a>. And it's a true open-source app under the GPL 3 license.</p>
One thing I like in a notetaking app, very much aside from how well it allows me to write blog posts, is the ability to add a checkbox function to to-do lists. This is my second requirement in a notes app, and I'm willing to use two apps, one for blogging and another for to-do lists.</p>
Folio doesn't do the checkboxes, even with the usual Markdown, which I believe is:</p>
- [ ]</code></p>
It renders Markdown so well that I'm surprised this isn't a feature. There's an issue for it in GitHub</a>, but it hasn't been added to the app.</p>
And one bug keeps coming up. When switching between notes, often one will display with only one line in it, even though it's longer. Continuing to toggle between the notes resolves the issue. It's a bit unsettling. I don't want to lose any work, though it hasn't come to that yet. I haven't quite figured out the pattern, which would help me avoid it.</p>
I'll have to check out the GitHub issues to see if anybody else has noticed.</p>
It could be https://github.com/toolstack/Folio/issues/300</a>, but it's more likely https://github.com/toolstack/Folio/issues/293</a>, and the project hasn't cut a release since before it was fixed.</p>
Why hasn't there been a release in almost a year? I don't know.</p>
Another thing:</strong> One way Folio doesn't do as good of a job as QOwnNotes at exporting Markdown files for blogging in my situation is that while QOwnNotes uses the note's name as the exported file's name, Folio leaves the file name blank, and you have to fill it in. It's quite an extra step</em>.</p>


How good is the Folio notetaking app?
2026-04-07T00:00:00+00:00
Folio</a> is all about Markdown files, yet it's a pretty simple notetaking app.</p>
Will it work for writing Zola and Hugo blog posts?</p>
You can name a file anything you want, and you choose an additional filename upon export to .md. (Don't give it an .md suffix, or you'll get .md.md</code>). I prefer the notetaking app to automatically assume that I want the note's name as the exported file's name while also allowing me to change it, but at least Folio remembers the file name I have chosen if I export the file multiple times, which I do with almost every post I write to either extend it or (much more often) fix errors.</p>
The Markdown rendering is nice. Not all notetaking apps that support Markdown can render it in the app, and render it well. I like a toggle between raw text and rendered Markdown, but it's not a must</em>.</p>
A couple of weird things in Folio that are not deal-breakers are that I can set an internal or external link, but I can't seem to click that link and be taken to its source. It should be something like shift-click</code>, but I can't figure out what works. And if you have a Markdown-coded word at the end of a sentence followed by a period, it's hard to then position your cursor after that period to do an edit. You have to go to the next line and backspace to the real end of the sentence.</p>
Also, I did have an issue where one of my notes kept slightly disappearing. It could have had something to do with two notes beginning with similar names (2026-0403). I renamed one 2026-0402, but this is an issue that I'll need to watch out for and also try to replicate.</p>
And just now my front-matter note seemed to be empty after I copy-pasted its contents into this note. I went to my text file in the GNOME Text Editor and copy-pasted it back into the note. Can I rely on Folio not to eat my notes</em>? I'm not sure just yet.</p>
Folio is very comfortable as a Markdown editor. You don't have to switch modes between Markdown source and rendered Markdown. The markup always renders, and if you want to see the source of an element, clicking on it will show the unrendered markup.</p>
For the purposes of getting my Zola front matter into new blog posts, I have that code in Folio as its own note. I wish there was a way to save as</em> or paste it as a macro. Folio is simple and has neither of those features. So I'll have to open that note and copy/paste its contents into a new one.</p>


More about QOwnNotes
2026-04-05T00:00:00+00:00
I'm not saying that QOwnNotes</a> is going to be my choice of notetaking apps both for regular notes and posts for my Zola blog, but it's definitely the front-runner.</p>
It's a true open-source app made in a real desktop framework, and so far it is working very well.</p>
Aside from Gnote and Sticky Notes, I had never used a notetaking app before, so the whole concept was new to me.</p>
To get a feel for QOwnNotes, start with the overview</a>.</p>


The Duplicate Note script in QOwnNotes copies Zola's TOML front matter into a new post
2026-04-04T00:00:00+00:00
I got a little deeper into QOwnNotes today. My goal was to script a way to easily start a new post with Zola front matter already in the note. For now I found an existing script in QOwnNotes called Duplicate Note.</p>
I created a note with the "raw" Zola post TOML front matter, and now I can select the note, right-click and duplicate it to begin the new post.</p>
I still have to name the note, though I don't have to type in a file name when exporting to the blog folder. And it's a time-saver because I don't have to leave QOwnNotes to find the front matter and copy/paste it into the new post.</p>
Go to Scripting -> Find scripts in script repository</code>, or click alt-shift-I</code> to get to the pre-made scripts and then search for Duplicate note</code>. Then select and install the script.</p>
There is documentation for making your own scripts</a>, and that's something I will leave for later. I think the move is adding a button or menu entry to automatically generate a "blank" note with all the TOML front matter in it. But for now, Duplicate note</code> should do the job.</p>


Solved: Why Zola wouldn't build my blog
2026-04-04T00:00:00+00:00
All of the new entries I made with notetaking apps were causing the Zola binary to stop with this error:</p>
$ ./zola build
</span>Building site...
</span>Checking all internal links with anchors.
</span>> Successfully checked 0 internal link(s) with anchors.
</span>-> Creating 26 pages (0 orphan) and 1 sections
</span>Error: Failed to build the site
</span>Error: Failed to render page '/var/home/steven/Sync/blogs/zola/passthejoe/content/blog/2024-10-16-free-hosted-blogging.md'
</span>Error: Reason: Failed to render 'page.html'
</span>Error: Reason: Function call 'get_taxonomy_term' failed
</span>Error: Reason: `get_taxonomy_term` received an unknown term: blogging
</span></code></pre>
Zola seems to think that one of my taxonomies</code> is blogging</em>. Except that blogging</em> is a category</em>, not a taxonomy on its own. And I have previous entries with blogging</em> as a category.</p>
I looked at the files generated by QOwnNotes and Folio, and the line endings looked fine: lf</em> all the way.</p>
The solution:</strong> It had nothing to do with the files created by the notetaking apps. or their line endings.</p>
I always forget about this: When picking taxonomies (in my case categories</code> and tags</code>), if a taxonomy is spelled with the same letters but different capitalization, the Zola binary will throw the error above.</p>
I had blogging</code> in one entry and Blogging</code> in another, notetaking apps</code> in one, Notetaking apps</code> in another.</p>
I don't know if this is considered a bug or a feature.</p>
But I now remember running into this in the past. So it's probably a good idea to be consistent with taxonomies. either all lower case, or upper case where appropriate. In any case, when the errors happen, it's easy enough to check your taxonomies on the live site and see what's baked into your system.</p>


Creating a Zola blog post in Joplin. It didn't go so well
2026-04-04T00:00:00+00:00
Can I create a blog post in Joplin</a> that easily</em> goes from the notetaking app to the directory where my Zola posts live?</p>
Many notetaking apps render Markdown, but not all can export an .md</code> file.</p>
Joplin can export an .md. First you need to specify a directory and set the note's name as the filename you want in Linux/Unix. And then it doesn't do well when I use brackets, which I need for Zola front matter as well as Markdown in the post.</p>
If I try to manually do a link like this</a>, it doesn't output right in the .md</code>. All of the[</code>and]</code> are preceded by an escape slash, as in \[</code> and \]</code>. Joplin does eventually render the manually typed Markdown correctly. It's not instant, but is fairly close.</p>
I thought there was a workaround. I clicked the Toggle Editors</code> button and was able to see the escapes and then tried to remove them. But soon enough, the brackets in my TOML front matter were escaped again. That's not going to work.</p>
Note:</strong> I fixed the escaped brackets and pulled some extra spaces out of the TOML front matter in the post, and it still wouldn't publish in Zola. I had to complete replace the front matter to get Zola to build the entry. So I'd say Joplin is a no</em> for Zola blog post writing.</p>
What I'm thinking:</strong> Maybe a notetaking app is a hammer and writing blog posts is not a nail</em>.</p>


Another Zola post created with the Folio notetaking app
2026-04-03T00:00:00+00:00
While trying to export this post, I had a bit of an issue with the note, but restarting Folio</a> brought it back. Losing notes or edits is always worrying, and until I know how it happened, and it doesn't repeat, I'll be wary of Folio.</p>
There's still some kind of bug happening. Could it be because both notes have names in Folio that begin with 2026-0403</code>?</p>


QOwnNotes has Vim mode
2026-04-03T00:00:00+00:00
There's a warning that says, some QOwnNotes shortcuts will not work</em>if you invoke Vim mode (Note -> Settings -> Editor -> Editor Options -> Enable Vim mode</code>).</p>
Still, Vim mode does work.</p>
The last app in which I used Vim mode (other than Vim) was the Kate text editor.</p>
Vim mode in QOwnNotes could be very helpful, though I'm not sure it's all that necessary</em> for my use of the app to write. I kind of wish it was a toggleable feature from the menu or toolbar and not something in the settings.</p>


Custom note names in QOwnNotes
2026-04-02T00:00:00+00:00
Since QOwnNotes</a> takes its note name from the first line of every post, and the first line of every Zola</a> blog post is +++</code> due to the TOML frontmatter</a>, I'm going to have to deal with this on the notetaking end of things.</p>
Naming the note by the Zola filename I want to use for the post would be the best outcome, and it turns out that is possible.</p>
When you try to rename a note, you get this dialog:</p>

If you want to rename your note you have to enable the option to allow the note filename to be different from the headline.</p>
</blockquote>
The dialog leads you right there, but you can get there any time in QOwnNotes under Note -> Settings -> Note Folders</code>. I only have one note folder at this point, and it's called default</code>, so right there I click the box next to Allow note file name to be different from headline</code>, and that lets me rename my notes. It's a nice feature that it's allowed by note folder (and that multiple note folders are possible).</p>
To veer off-topic only slightly, one of the things I like about QOwnNotes is that it is a native application coded in C++ with the QT toolkit</a>. It's not an Electron app yet is still available for Linux, Windows, MacOS, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.</p>
Another point in QOwnNotes' favor for the purpose of creating posts for static sites is that when exporting, the program remembers the directory and file name you last used, which saves considerably on clicking and typing. It makes the export a fairly seamless part of my blogging workflow.</p>


A Zola post created in the Folio notetaking app
2026-04-02T00:00:00+00:00
Can the Folio notetaking app</a> help me create blog posts for Zola?</p>
So far the files look clean. They exist as Unix files, with the default location being ~.var/app/com.toolstack.Folio/data</code> for the Folio Flatpak. And the working directory can be moved out of the Flatpak area and into other parts of the home directory, which is good because I don't always back up the Flatpak data under .var</code>. So far, so good.</p>
You can set a name for a note in Folio and when exporting to the file system. When exporting to your blog's /content</code> directory, don't add the .md</code>, or you'll get .md.md</code> in the exported file's name.</p>
Even though files seem to save themselves, there is a config setting to automatically save files every 30 seconds. I set that. One thing I don't want to do is have to remember to save a file.</p>


This is a Zola post that started in QOwnNotes
2026-03-29T00:00:00+00:00
Can I create a Zola blog post in a notetaking app and have it successfully move from the app to the live site?</p>
If you're seeing this, the answer is yes.</p>


Derek Sivers' minimal .vimrc is only 4 lines long
2025-11-13T00:00:00+00:00
In Hyde's Lazybear blog's Over/Under #37</a> featuring Derek Sivers, they both agree that Vim is underrated:</p>
Derek</a> says about Vim:</p>

I’m out to learn, to challenge myself, to be more self-reliant. So my .vimrc</code> is just 4 lines:</p>
</blockquote>
syntax on
</span>filetype plugin on
</span>filetype indent on
</span>set autoindent
</span></code></pre>
My "normal" .vimrc</code> is very long, though my OpenBSD .vimrc</code> is now zero lines, so this should work for me.</p>


Getting rid of old tech
2025-10-04T00:00:00+00:00
I just took a couple of old laptops to Goodwill, along with a few bagfuls of miscellaneous cables, adapters, hubs, access points ... you get the idea. I have a couple of old Mac laptops that I will try to sell on eBay, but these two just didn't seem worth the trouble. One was a 2012 HP Pavilion, the other an IBM Thinkpad R32. I hope they go to someone who wants this old tech. If not, I can live with it. I just wanted the stuff out of my house.</p>
I can't keep everything, and I don't want to.</p>
There are more boxes of tech in my shed to go through. I wonder what's in them.</p>


One month with the Aeon Desktop: An immutable Linux distribution that uses openSUSE Tumbleweed packages
2025-08-31T00:00:00+00:00
I've had my eye on the Aeon Desktop</a> — an atomic/immutable Linux distribution that is downstream from openSUSE Tumbleweed</a>, and after watching project leader Richard Brown make his pitch</a> in a conference talk</a>, I was ready to go.</p>
I had been running Fedora Silverblue — that project's atomic/immutable flagship — from version 38 through 42, a little more than 2 years. That's a lot of ticks in Linux user time.</em> The experience has been solid, but not trouble-free.</p>
During the time I ran Silverblue, I remember a show-stopping bootloader issue that required manual intervention, and numerous infrastructure-related hiccups that kept updates from flowing. At one point I couldn't start certain apps until an update fixed the bug.</p>
In regular Fedora fashion, the issues are usually resolved within two weeks, usually by an update and occasionally with some command-line magic provided by a very helpful community of developers who also use the system every day.</p>
Compared to my past memories/experience with Fedora Workstation, the frequency of bugs in Silverblue was slightly higher but manageable. Even so, I wondered how the immutable competition was shaping up.</p>
Might as well give something else a try. If it's worse, I can always come back — or do what I usually do when things go awry, which is turn to Debian Stable for some rock-solid computing based on time-tested (and old) tech.</p>
In the beginning (or at least in Silverblue 38), one of the reasons I had for starting and sticking with Fedora's immutable offering was the idea that it was/is the future</em>, and Fedora (and by extension Red Hat) was putting not-insignificant resources behind realizing it. I also figured there would be a large, supportive community taking the leap into the atomic/immutable world together.</p>
While I think the overall Fedora Project has a robust "community feel," and I have repeatedly benefited from the help of other experienced users — including many who work at Red Hat — I get the feeling that Silverblue itself is something of a rudderless ship. Sure there are users. I don't know how many. They keep pretty quiet. And I don't hear much about cool new features coming soon to the atomic desktop.</p>
I look at the changes coming for Fedora 43</a>, which releases in November, and I don't see anything about Silverblue. Not one thing.</p>
Meanwhile, Aeon is already doing things I hope Silverblue will</em> do but which don't seem likely to happen in the near (or far) future:</p>

Distrobox</a> instead of Toolbox</a>: When was the last time Toolbox added one of the many features it lacks that Distrobox already offers? I can't remember. Being coded in Golang isn't enough. (Distrobox was a big motivator in getting me to switch.)</li>
Automatic updates of the base system, Flatpaks and Distrobox containers with no need for user intervention. (This is the dream.)</li>
Installing minimal Flatpaks by default and doing them per user — and from Flathub (This is the way to do it.)</li>
Booting with systemd-boot instead of the traditional GRUB (Seamless, I tell you.)</li>
MANY snapshots for fallback, not just the last two or three (Thanks, btrfs.)</li>
Rolling release — no more six-month upgrades (This is ALSO the dream.)</li>
</ul>
I confess that in all the time I've run Linux and BSD (since 2007), I have never — before now — run an openSUSE-related distro on bare metal for more than an hour. I was going to just say "never, ever" but I found this post from 2008</a> where I installed openSUSE 10.3 on a free partition on a Debian Lenny-running laptop. I couldn't get Ethernet working in openSUSE, and I soon replaced it with NetBSD. I'm sure NetBSD didn't last very long either, but that's another story.</p>
Fast forward. I gave openSUSE Leap 15 a pretty good tryout on a VM in 2024. It performed very well. This is a solid, stable distro.</p>
So once I heard about Aeon and its promise of an optimized, maintenance-free desktop experience, I was ready to try it.</p>
I freshened up the backups of my user files and got ready to wipe Silverblue.</p>
Once I figured out that the Aeon boot image isn't an .iso</code> or .img</code> but a raw.xz</code> that needs to stay that way (DON'T extract it!!) when using Fedora Media Writer</a> or GNOME Impression</a> to put it on a USB flash drive for booting, I was on my way.</p>
Aeon uses TPM (Trusted Platform Module)</a> 2 to manage full disk encryption, but during the super-fast install process, the installer told my my TPM 2 was too old, and I needed to use a passphrase. No problem. I didn't expect much from my 8-year-old HP laptop, so I was fine entering a passphrase. I have been doing that to unlock encrypted partitions for many years, including in Silverblue, so I'm accustomed to the procedure. I did get an image on screen during the install that showed me an unlock key and a QR code in case I forgot the passphrase. I took a picture of it with my phone.</p>
Before I knew it, Aeon was installed, and the system had brought in a minimal set of Flatpaks. I had Firefox, the GNOME Text Editor, two terminals (Console and Ptyxis), Files (aka Nautilus), the Calculator app, Disks, the GNOME System Monitor, the Settings app, Help, and — crucially — the Refine app</a>, which is a Flatpak that does some of the things that GNOME Tweaks used to handle. Ever notice that GNOME Tweaks isn't offered as a Flatpak? Refine fills that gap</a>.</p>
Two things I learned pretty quickly are:</p>

Aeon updates if and when the laptop is plugged into power. Otherwise it doesn't (though this behavior can be modified</a>). Not a problem. There's pretty much a new update every day, and if you skip a day — or a week — you'll get an update eventually.</li>
Windows can FUCK YOU UP.</li>
</ul>
Windows murders Aeon:</strong> I have been worried about the impending expiration of Microsoft's Secure Boot signing key, and I hadn't updated the BIOS in this HP laptop in years. This is a task that fwupd</code> doesn't seem to handle on this particular laptop. I could tell that my BIOS was many, many versions behind what HP is now offering. So after a week using Aeon on this two-drive laptop (NVMe for Aeon and SATA SSD for OpenBSD), I removed the SATA drive and put my old Windows HDD drive back in.</p>
I booted Windows. The HP update software didn't work. It suggested that I needed to update Windows.</p>
After TWO WHOLE DAYS of updating the Windows system, with countless reboots and scant information on what was happening at any given time, the HP BIOS/driver update software still didn't work. Instead I went to the HP website, downloaded the .exe</code> to update the BIOS, did that in 5 minutes and was on my way. I could have just put the Windows drive in the laptop, not done ANY updates and run that .exe</code>.</p>
That would have saved me a whole lot of trouble.</p>
Little did I know that putting the Windows 10 SATA drive back into the laptop and doing all of those updates also led to Microsoft erasing something on my totally separate</em> Aeon NVMe drive that prevented it from booting. I didn't ask for that. Nobody asks Windows to fuck with unrelated drives. But it does.</p>
In hindsight, I should have pulled the Aeon drive before mucking around with Windows. But I didn't want to go through the trouble of removing the NVMe. I didn't want to mess with that little screw. Bad decision.</p>
Sad note:</strong> I still didn't get a new Microsoft signing key. I hope that Aeon brings this in as a shim. (Is that the right way to say it?)</p>
After Windows killed Aeon, I removed the Windows drive. I had backups of my Aeon user files that were almost</em> up to date. I had missed a couple of changes in two files but was able to re-create them from a secondary backup in one case and Mastodon posts in the other.</p>
My second Aeon install went as quickly and easily as the first. You can literally be up and running in minutes.</p>
I was back in Aeon. So how does it perform?</p>
Aeon has a project leader who says he has made sure the system runs as fast and lean as possible, with exactly the features he wants and can deliver. It's pure install-it-run-it desktop goodness.</p>
It is meant to be a complete Linux desktop in the tradition of Google's ChromeOS in that it updates itself without user intervention. Unlike ChromeOS, with Aeon you can install anything you want from Flatpak (for GUI apps) or Distrobox (for CLI).</p>
Even the Distroboxes are updated automatically. Compare that with whatever you need to do to update Toolboxes</a> in Fedora. I say "whatever you need to do," because I don't think Toolboxes can really be correctly, successfully updated</em>. In Silverblue, I eventually took to periodically deleting all of my Toolbox instances — and the images they were based on — and then re-creating them. In Aeon, I don't have to think about it at all. It's automatic.</p>
I couldn't tell you how Aeon works under the hood. I don't have to know. I don't have to do any fiddling or babysitting. Everything updates all the time.</p>
If an update to Aeon's base system breaks functionality, all you have to do is hold down the space bar after booting, choose an older snapshot and boot from it. There will be another snapshot very soon — and another after that — and pretty soon whatever was broken will be fixed. That's the theory, anyway. So far it has worked for me, though I will admit it's early days.</p>
My second</em> Aeon system has been alive for about a month. I have added all the Flatpaks I need. Everything is working well.</p>
The laptop has never run cooler, quieter or faster.</p>
I recommend using the Ptyxis terminal, which makes it easy to open a Distrobox container. And I also recommend setting up a Distrobox for general use. That's where I added full Vim</a>, htop</code>, the programming environments I'm using at this particular time, and the Zola</a> and Hugo</a> executables I use for building static sites.</p>
Aeon uses packages from openSUSE Tumbleweed</a>, and I've found that the default Distroboxes, which use a Tumbleweed image and repositories, are also of extremely high quality.</p>
It makes me think about running openSUSE</a>, be it Tumbleweed, Slowroll or Leaf, in those cases where I want a traditional Linux distro. Though on the desktop, I can't really see wanting that</em> any more. I like the atomic/immutable way of using Linux, and I expect it to get better and better.</p>
Note:</strong> There has been some misunderstanding recently about Aeon and its relationship with SUSE and openSUSE. It's not easy to get this right, and I don't know if my language here is correct:</p>
The project was begun by Richard Brown, who is a current SUSE employee, and it was at one time tied to openSUSE MicroOS and that project's install image. But at this point in its life, Aeon is an independent project with its own governance and installer. Aeon does rely on packages and repositories from openSUSE Tumbleweed but is put together by Brown and his team outside of the purview of the openSUSE mothership. Aeon Desktop purposefully doesn't include openSUSE in its name, and there are guidelines the project abides by</a> regarding logos and branding.</p>
Aeon's installer isn't unusual for its own sake. It uses Richard Brown's tik</a> tool — tik = Tailored Installation Kit — to install the system. One of the features of tik is that in the event that the disk to which you are installing Aeon meets certain conditions (which will be present on disks that already have an Aeon system), the installer (given a large-enough USB flash drive) will copy the old install's user information and user files and re-create them on the new installation. It's a pretty neat trick. I don't know if it's appropriate to call it a "get out of jail free" card, but that's how I'm looking at it. I can only imagine how long it would take to copy my huge amount of user files to the USB drive and back again to the new system, but that's an experiment for another time.</p>
Conclusion:</strong> Aeon Desktop is unlike any other OS out there. This atomic/immutable system is built for speed and ease of use, with openSUSE Tumbleweed packages at its core. After a quick install, you add your Flatpaks, and that's it. From a technical and features standpoint, it's far ahead of Fedora Silverblue. And after the install, Aeon basically maintains itself. There is no fiddling. Distrobox is in the default. If you're into distro-hopping, put this one on your "to try" list. And if you want to stick with one OS for some time to come, Aeon has a lot to offer.</p>


I ordered new typewriter ribbons in unusual colors
2025-08-21T00:00:00+00:00
I have two manual typewriters — a Remington Noiseless Portable from the 1930s and a Royal 440 office model from the 1960s — and they both need new ribbons.</p>
Sometimes the ribbons are "typed out," and have little ink left. Other times they dry out from age.</p>
In the olden days (through the 1990s, I expect), when you bought new ribbons for most typewriters, you got them on a spool that fit your machine. Nowadays you still can</em> get proper spools, but they're rare and often expensive.</p>
Luckily almost all typewriters use 1/2-inch ribbon. The spools might be different, but what winds onto them is the same. So the move is to buy the ribbon on generic spools and then wind it onto your typewriter's existing spools.</p>
Are you still with me?</p>
My source of typewriter information, besides the internet, is Reddit, where r/typewriters</a> has a wonderful community of enthusiasts who are regularly acquiring, cleaning, fixing and using typewriters — both manual and electric.</p>
There are maybe a few "popular" vendors for replacement typewriter ribbons, and the one I just ordered from is Ribbons Unlimited</a>. They sell a lot of ribbons for typewriters, adding machines and cash registers.</p>
Shipping from Ribbons Unlimited is a $5.99 flat rate for the U.S., and they do charge sales tax (for California in my case).</p>
Most typewriters allow for two different colors of typing -- generally black and red, on a two-color ribbon. A lever allows you to switch between the two.</p>
Ribbons Unlimited sells a lot of interesting colors — and offers ribbons in nylon, silk and cotton. I went for nylon. I like the crisp output seen in the samples they offer on their website</a>.</p>
The colors I ordered:</p>
purple / green</p>
blue / red</p>
green / orange</p>
I'll see how they look once I get a couple wound into my two typewriters.</p>
Update on 8/31/2025:</strong> The ribbons arrived a few days ago. I haven't had the chance to try them. I need to wait for my broken foot to heal more before I pull out the Royal 440, but I should be able to work on the Remington in the next week or so.</p>
Update on 2/25/2026:</strong> I finally dragged the Royal 440 onto the desk, and I have put new ribbons on both typewriters. It was a lot of unspooling and respooling, and I had to refer to pictures on the internet to remember how to get the ribbon in the ribbon vibrator for the Remington. I had it wrong at first. For the Royal, I took note (and photos) of what it looked like, and it went back together more easily. Now I have to take a couple photos of what the typed output looks like. That'll make this post a lot more interesting.</p>


A couple CSS tweaks makes Zola's Hook theme easier on the eyes
2025-08-19T00:00:00+00:00
I've had a few problems with the Hook theme</a> in Zola</a>. Some I fixed myself, even if they were eventually fixed by the theme writer/maintainer. It's all an opportunity to learn how Zola, the Tera template engine</a>, and HTML/CSS</a> work.</p>
I chose this theme due to functionality and simplicity, but as the entries have built up, the layout of the home page and archive page is looking a little cramped.</p>
To clear it up, I took away the text-decoration</code> from the a, a:link, a:visited</code> elements, added text-decoration</code> to a:hover</code> and added some padding to li</code>.</p>
Here are parts I changes in /themes/zola-hook/sass/_theme.scss</code>:</p>

</span>a</span>, </span>a</span>:link, </span>a</span>:visited {
</span>    </span>color</span>: </span>var</span>(</span>--accent</span>);
</span>    </span>text-decoration</span>: </span>none</span>;
</span>}
</span>
</span>a</span>:hover {
</span>    </span>color</span>: </span>var</span>(</span>--accent-highlight</span>);
</span>    </span>text-decoration</span>: </span>underline</span>;
</span>}
</span>
</span>li </span>{
</span>    </span>padding-bottom</span>: </span>10</span>px</span>;
</span>}
</span>
</span></code></pre>


I bought an HP Envy laptop in 2017, and it has been my daily driver for 8 years
2025-07-12T00:00:00+00:00
I bought this HP Envy 15 laptop 8 years ago, and it's still running very well.</p>
I run Fedora Silverblue and OpenBSD on it with no issues. I pulled the spinning Windows drive years ago, and it now contains two SSDs (NVMe for Fedora and SATA for OpenBSD).</p>
The rubber strips on the bottom fell off (front) and were pulled off (rear, to get the case open for upgrades) years ago, and since then I use those little clear stick-on rubber/plastic feet from the hardware store to keep the metal case from scratching tables and woggling around.</p>
(Aside: Are metal laptop cases better than plastic? NO.)</p>
I have replaced the battery twice. The most recent one has lasted a long time.</p>
Keyboard, touchpad and screen are fine.</p>
It shipped with 16 GB of RAM, and that's still a decent amount. I thought its 1080p screen would be a thing of the past in maybe a year or two, but today most laptops still offer the same 1920x1080p resolution.</p>
It could die any day, but it shows no sign of doing so.</p>
All in all, a good purchase.</p>


Linux and BSD theory: 6-month upgrades offer a different kind of 'stability' than waiting 2, 3 or 5 years
2025-07-12T00:00:00+00:00
I'm going to throw a theory</em> out here based on my experience with Fedora (Workstation and Silverblue), Debian Stable and OpenBSD over many upgrade cycles:</p>
Six-month upgrades lead to a more stable system than 2-, 3- or 5-year upgrades.</em></p>
I think the reason is that the overall system doesn't have nearly as far to go when it is upgraded every 6 months.</em> There are fewer changes at once and hence fewer things to go wrong. There is also less cruft between upgrades to potentially "mess things up" when newer software is introduced to a running system.</p>
I've been running Fedora Silverblue from version 38 through 42, and OpenBSD from 7.3 to 7.7, and in both cases the 6-month upgrades have been quick and uneventful.</p>
I've upgraded Debian from 10 through 12 on another machine, and after every major upgrade I need to mess with the kernels and/or boot parameters to get the brightness adjustment to work. And now I'm having an issue with LibreOffice in Debian 12 where it won't open files I created in the LO Flatpak in Fedora 42.</p>
I'm not saying that in-place Debian upgrades are nothing but problems. I've personally had a lot of success with running and upgrading Debian over many, many times.</p>
And as a point of order, I don't run much Ubuntu (or its derivatives), but I hear about a lot of issues when LTS systems are upgraded after years of service.</p>
So there's a whole lot of anecdotal information here, and I'd love to hear what Ubuntu users who upgrade every 6 months think of this theory.</p>
But more than what theoretically (or anecdotally) happens with Debian and Ubuntu LTS, it's the lack of drama I experience with the more-frequent releases of OpenBSD and Fedora leading me to the conclusion that 6-month releases have their own kind of stability that shouldn't be ignored.</em></p>


Testing new and keeping old Linux distros in 2025
2025-07-05T00:00:00+00:00
I generally stick with an operating system on my main laptop for a couple years. When I run into an unsolvable (by me) problem, or just get bored, I tend to make a move.</p>
That move isn't always from something old to something new. Most of the time I'm going back to a system I have run before. Usually Debian.</p>
My lightly used desktop — a 27-inch 2011 iMac</a> stuffed with 20 GB of RAM — has pretty much run Debian since I brought it over to Linux. Debian 10, 11 and now 12 have all run on this castoff computer, which has its original 1 TB spinning hard drive behind the monitor glass. It would take a lot for me to want to remove that giant display to swap in a SATA SSD. Basically the drive would have to die. It hasn't.</p>
I've probably had the iMac on Debian since 2017 or '18. It still has an ancient MacOS partition on it, though there is no reason to boot into it, and Debian keeps stomping on the rEFInd boot manager</a> I installed when I added Linux.</p>
It's almost time for Debian 13, and I will very likely just upgrade the iMac. Barring some issues with LibreOffice Writer not being able to open a file I created with the newer LO on my Fedora Silverblue 42 laptop, everything seems to be working. This 14-year-old hardware still runs great under GNOME.</p>
My 2017 HP Envy laptop (all Intel) — my daily driver computer for personal use — has seen time on Debian 10 and 11, Fedora Workstation, Silverblue and Kinoite, and OpenBSD.</p>
Right now it has two SSD drives (SATA and NVMe — a nice touch on laptops of this period), with Fedora Silverblue 42 on the NVMe and OpenBSD 7.7 on the SATA. Aside from a short rebase to and from Kinoite, this has been my setup for nearly 3 years.</p>
Short aside:</strong> Rebasing</a> in the Fedora Atomic family of distros is a cool trick. It's both the way you change from one Atomic distro to another, as well as upgrade from one release to the next.</p>
Along with Fedora Kinoite I did a lot of recent testing of KDE Plasma distros in live environments. I also tested a few LXQt distros (which I like, but also which won't do a complete dark mode without a fight in which I'm unwilling to engage).</p>
I didn't think Kinoite had the same polish as Silverblue. Along with the desktop switch, I also moved to as many KDE Flatpaks as I could, dumping the equivalent GNOME/GTK Flatpaks in the process.</p>
I ended up missing a lot of GTK apps that I could have continued using with Kinoite. But I figured that if I'm not going all Plasma/Qt, I might as well stay in GNOME.</p>
Plus, Kinoite didn't handle GTK dark mode as well as Silverblue handles Qt dark mode.</p>
Traditional Plasma distros I tested (Debian 12 and 13, Fedora 42) had none of these problems, which were exclusive to Kinoite.</p>
There were a number of little things that didn't work right in Atomic Plasma that were fine in normal Plasma, and I didn't get the feeling that anybody was really working on those issues in Kinoite.</p>
Overall I'm really liking Plasma 6, and I wouldn't hesitate to run Plasma in the current Debian and Fedora releases.</p>
But I feel like the GNOME Project is developing with Atomic in mind, and the Fedora Project is positioning Silverblue as somewhat of a priority. I'd like to see a bigger and/or more active Silverblue/Kinoite community. Atomic is the future, and it's mostly</em> ready now.</p>
Someone asked recently if I had tried the Aeon Desktop</a>, the atomic Linux distro that draws packages from openSUSE</a>'s Tumbleweed</a> repositories. A lot of very solid choices have been made for Aeon, and I could very well run it as my daily driver. (Update on 8/19/2025:</strong> I now am running Aeon as my main system on the laptop.</em>)</p>
But I'm telling myself that I should stick with Silverblue because of the support from Fedora/Red Hat and the community, though I tend to feel pretty alone as a Silverblue user. Still, there's a certain (perceived by me) simplicity and reliability in Silverblue that keeps me running it.</p>
I know the prevailing opinion is that Distrobox is better than Fedora's Toolbx for CLI and GUI development environments, but I have changed the way I use Toolbx to make it really work for me. I'll go over it in more detail in a future post, but the short  version is that I create my Toolbx containers quickly. And instead of updating them individually with distro tools like dnf</code> and apt</code>, I periodically delete all my Toolbx containers and the images they are based on with a single per-image toolbox</code> command. Then I re-create as needed.</p>
The six-month Silverblue upgrade is a generally mild annoyance that Aeon avoids, but there is a certain solid stability — even amid constant updates — that keeps me in Fedora's Atomic environment.</p>
Update on 8/31/2025:</strong> I upgraded the iMac to Debian 13. The terminal died during the upgrade, taking GNOME along with it, and I had to continue in a virtual session. It did work.</p>
I'm sticking with Aeon on the laptop. So far, so good.</p>


How to get the Foliate ebook reader Flatpak to work
2025-07-04T00:00:00+00:00
I've been having a problem with the Foliate ebook reader</a>. It is a very nice GTK4 app. But when I run the Flatpak in Fedora Silverblue, Foliate keeps "losing" its connection to any books I add to it.</p>
If I reboot, the books look like they are still there after I start Foliate, but when I click on them, the reader comes back with "file not found."</p>
So I went into Flatseal</a>, the Flatpak that controls permissions for other Flatpaks. Yes, it's a meta</em> Flatpak (but not a Meta</em> Flatpak). If you run Flatpaks at all, you need it.</p>
In Flatseal, I went to Foliate and hit the switch that allows it to see the home</code> directory.</p>
That did it. The fix couldn't have been easier. Now Foliate doesn't "forget" where the ebooks are between boots.</p>
It's weird that before the fix, Foliate could add the books and continue to "see" them until a reboot. But since changing this permission/access in Flatseal fix makes the problem go away, I don't have to think about it any more — beyond filing a bug or issue upstream asking them to ship the Foliate Flatpak with this bit added.</p>
I initially thought</em> I could use Flatseal to just let Foliate see the directories where I have ebooks, but that isn't enough. There must be some config in /home</code> that it needs to see. Just allowing the app to see the actual ebook files is not enough. I could probably figure this out, but I don't have a burning desire (though I could be persuaded) to keep Foliate from seeing all of /home</code>, which is fairly standard for Linux applications. I bet most traditional apps can read/write a lot more than /home.</code></p>
On my way to this solution, I tried the Foliate Flatpak from the Flathub and Fedora repos, and the problem existed in both.</p>
Especially with this fix, I recommend Foliate. The app works very well and looks great. One of the things that made my stay in Plasma-based Fedora Kinoite short was that the KDE ebook reader Arianna</a> isn't nearly as good as Foliate.</p>
Whether it's functionality, design or familiarity, I tend to like GTK apps more then their KDE equivalents. And as long as that is the case, I might as well be in a GTK-based distro, which for me right now is the atomic/immutable Fedora Silverblue. As I say in my recent post on trying Linux distros</a>, there are some nice little KDE features that don't work in the atomic Fedora Kinoite, along with papercuts I would rather live without. (I'd love for Atomic Plasma to be as good as Atomic GNOME, but it's not there just yet.)</p>
Back to Foliate. I also run it in OpenBSD</a> with Xfce. It works great there as well.</p>
Update on 2/26/2026:</strong> I'm now running Bluefin</a>, and the Foliate Flatpak works with no intervention. What is Bluefin doing right</em>?</p>


I now have an 'official' Linux terminal in Android
2025-07-03T00:00:00+00:00
It's not like Android hasn't had its own Linux terminal before now. Termux</a> has been around for a while. But now that Google is offering a standard Debian Linux terminal on many Android phones</a>, is it more than a gimmick?</p>
I have a Pixel phone, so it worked. I followed the instructions</a> in Jack Wallen's ZDNet article and soon had a Debian console without incident. I'm not sure if sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade</code> is the approved way to bring it up to date, but that's what I did.</p>
I gave vi</code> a try, and that's about it for now. I later figured out — and subsequently forgot — where to put files so they can be accessed both by the Debian terminal and the phone.</p>
I could see myself using this to manage my servers. I did it with an Android app for a while with user name and password, but I never got my ssh keys into the phone and for that reason couldn't really do it.</em> Maybe this will give me the incentive to get it working.</p>
Even though the terminal font is super small, I might</em> be persuaded that this is more than a gimmick if I could make use of my Bluetooth keyboard to do some work in Vim and other console programs. Maybe I could build and deploy a Zola blog from the phone and share it to the desktop via git.</p>
Update:</strong> The Android terminal blew up during an update (not one in the shell but for the app overall), and I haven't bothered trying to bring it back to life.</p>


Los Angeles Sanitation holiday trash collection
2025-05-26T00:00:00+00:00
The main reason residents of Los Angeles go to the city's Sanitation web site</a> is to find out when trash (and recycling and green waste) pickup is delayed due to a holiday.</p>
That page is not easy to find. The trash pickup situation for upcoming holidays should be on the LA Sanitation home page at all times, and the full page should be prominently, permanently linked.</p>
I can never find it. Instead, I search for it every time, and here it is:</p>
City of Los Angeles Holiday Trash Collection</a></p>
In addition, there is a very nice, super graphical 2025 LA City Sanitation Calendar</a>, which should be printed and sent to every city resident. I'd put it up.</p>
To save you a click, here are the LA Sanitation holidays where trash collection is delayed by a day:</p>

NEW YEAR'S DAY</li>
INDEPENDENCE DAY</li>
LABOR DAY</li>
THANKSGIVING DAY</li>
CHRISTMAS</li>
NEW YEAR'S DAY</li>
</ul>


Broken time: Bill Evans and Miles Davis
2025-05-20T00:00:00+00:00
You'll get most of the story by listening to Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue,"</a> with the trumpeter's first classic quintet, and Bill Evans' "The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961,"</a> with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, but if you want to read about it, there is a lot of context for both in "Broken Time: 'Nardis' and the Curious History of a Jazz Obsession,"</a> by Steve Silberman.</p>
"Kind of Blue" remains a great introduction to Miles Davis, Bill Evans, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley — and the styles of cool and modal jazz.</p>
Lately I have spent a whole lot of time listening to the interplay of pianist Bill Evans, bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian on "The Complete Village Vanguard." You can hear the bass better on these live recordings than you can on the few tracks this trio recorded in the studio. It's all about how piano and bass are not sticking to their established roles and instead creating something totally original.</p>
Make sure when you listen that you can hear the bass. LaFaro died young (and tragically)</a>, and he's basically frozen in time on these recordings.</p>
Despite heroin addiction, Evans went on to make many excellent recordings with other players, though none as classic as what came out of 1961's "Village Vanguard" sessions. I'd say most of Evans' other bassists were informed</em> by LaFaro's work on "Village Vanguard," but nobody's a carbon copy.</p>
To make sure you have all the Miles Davis with Bill Evans</em>, check out the "Kind of Blue: Legacy Edition"</a>, which has a few tracks that didn't make the original album. The inclusion of Evans in the Miles Davis group is so rare, all is well worth studying.</p>


Zola for Note Taking by Bhavani Shankar
2025-05-14T00:00:00+00:00
In his post, A simple setup for distraction free writing</a>, Bhavani Shankar goes over his workflow, which includes the Helix text editor (Vim-like but with more batteries included than Neovim) and Zola "for generating websites and taking notes."</p>
I keep trying the hot/new editors of the moment (or of the past 5 years ...), and I've been through Neovim, the GUI version Neovide and now Helix.</p>
Since I rely heavily on macros in my .vimrc</code>, and none of those macros work in the vimrc-like config for Neovim, and I couldn't find any documentation for Helix that mentions macros and how to do them.</p>
I'm guessing that the Neovim community is encouraging the configuration based on Lua rather than Vimscript, which is fine except that I don't know how to replicate my .vimrc</code> in either Neovim or Helix.</p>
If I want "distraction-free" writing, I can do that in Vim or the GNOME Text editor (which I'm using now).</p>
And of course I'm in favor of using Zola as a static-site generator, though Hugo would work just as well.</p>
One thing I did to make my publishing workflow more efficient is move a copy of my rsync deploy script into my main Zola directory. That way I can zola build</code> and then run the rsync script without having to change directories at all.</p>
As an aside, making simple scripts is the only way</em> to use rsync. And I almost always prefer rsync to using an FTP client. It's easier and faster.</p>
I could reduce the number of steps even further by writing a script that put the zola build</code> and rsync operations under a single command.</p>


Evangelina Mascardi plays Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major BWV 998 on the Baroque lute
2025-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

  
  </iframe>
</div>


Find all the lute articles at earlymusicreview.com without a bunch of flute articles creeping into the search
2025-04-28T00:00:00+00:00
I'm developing an interest in the lute</a> — the plucked-string instrument developed in ancient times and popular between the 13th and 18th centuries in Europe.</p>
Aside from a lot of listening in Spotify, I am looking to read more about the lute and lute recordings. To that end, I found this review</a> of "A Lute by Sixtus Rauwolf: French and German Baroque Music," by Jakob Lindberg, who it seems owns the late-16th century lute named in the title.</p>
Once you begin looking for information on the lute — books, articles, web sites — you start realizing that there is not enough</em>, especially when compared with most other classical</em> instruments.</p>
Eager to find more lute articles at https://earlymusicreview.com</a>, I did a search for lute</em>, which yielded a lot of CD reviews on discs featuring the flute.</p>
How to get just lute</em> and not flute</em>? Sometimes using the minus key will exclude a word from the search results. That does work here.</p>
A search for lute -flute</a> leads to 308 articles, presumably all about the lute.</p>
Time to start reading and listening.</p>


How to create RSS/Atom feeds in Zola for your tags, categories and any other taxonomies you've set up
2025-03-17T00:00:00+00:00
In my effort to build out my own Zola site and get the Hook</a> theme to do what I want, I look at the After Dark</a> theme — which is maintained by the Zola team — for coding tips (i.e. things I can steal).</p>
I was in After Dark looking for something else, and I noticed that the theme's config.toml</code></a> has code that tells Zola to create separate RSS/Atom feeds for every category and tag you set up.</p>
Here is that code:</p>
taxonomies </span>= </span>[
</span>    {</span>name </span>= </span>"</span>categories</span>"</span>, </span>feed </span>= </span>true</span>},
</span>    {</span>name </span>= </span>"</span>tags</span>"</span>, </span>feed </span>= </span>true</span>},
</span>]
</span></code></pre>
(Strong hint:</strong> It's the feed = true</code> part)</p>
This is another great Zola feature that I'm going to take advantage of immediately. I should also probably just move to the After Dark theme so I get all of the good stuff out of the box.</p>
The next thing in After Dark that I want (and don't have) is the site search</a>. I could port that over to Hook, or just move to the theme that already has it. But I bet I can easily add it to my current theme.</p>
Before I leave this post, I'd like to point out that some work has been done on Hook since Zola 0.20 came out, and it looks like the template that allows rss.xml</code> and atom.xml</code> to be built</a> has been fixed. That is nice to see.</p>


A rough week for Fedora Kinoite users (at least for this one)
2025-03-06T00:00:00+00:00
Things can run off the rails a bit in any Linux distribution, and it's not fun waiting for things to begin moving in the right direction: back onto the rails</em>.</p>
Over the years I have been running Linux, I am stopped in my tracks</em> by an average of one show-stopping bug/problem per Debian release (meaning one every 2 years) and one for every other Fedora release (generaly one per year).</p>
In my memory, all of the issues tend to be resolved within a couple of weeks, either through patches from the project or the help of other users and developers. It all sounds great until you're in the middle of one of those bugs.</p>
For the past two weeks in Fedora Kinoite, I've been "hit" by two fairly serious issues at the same time. And one prevented the other from being resolved.</p>
First there was the matter of the 6.13.4 Linux kernel.</p>
Until this update, Kinoite had been great for the few weeks I have run it. My Silverblue/GNOME/GTK (I never did nail it down) issue with power management that led to the screen freezing, with the laptop unresponsive until I did a hard boot, was gone with the switch to Kinoite.</p>
Any KDE or LXQT live system also made the issue go away. I ran Debian, Lubuntu and Fedora live systems for days at a time With any system based on either of the QT desktop environments, all of my problems were gone.</p>
I felt lucky that a (relatively) quick rebase from Fedora Silverblue to Kinoite also made my 2017 HP Envy Intel laptop run without trouble.</p>
That all stopped with the 2/26/2025 update to Kinoite. The update replaced the 6.12 kernel with 6.13.4, and right away I started getting frozen screens, sometimes at random but also every time I tried to upload a photo to a WordPress site using any Flatpak web browser. Again, the only way back was a hard reboot.</p>
The latter bug is known, but that didn't help me, especially because I was experiencing another bug: Something having to do with Fedora Infrastructure's Cloudfront service was preventing me from getting new updates to the Kinoite main system. It would error out with HTTP 502 every time. This went on from 2/28/2025 until 3/5/2025, when I finally got a new Kinoite deployment.</p>
That 3/5 update was a little shaky. I did have one freeze — likely when the system was automatically suspending after a certain amount of idle time. But I was able to upload in Flatpak browsers, so I could get work done.</p>
Now I'm running the 3/6/2025 Kinoite image, and everything is working like it should. No freezing screens — yet.</p>
I hope it continues. I have been thinking of where to go next, distro-wise, but sticking with Kinoite is what I'd like to do for now.</p>
And while I know it can take up to two weeks — and I never remember it being longer, it seems longer</em> when waiting for the problem (in this case the can't get an update</em> problem) to be resolved.</p>
I'd like to thank the Fedora Infrastructure team and all the Fedora/Red Hat developers for figuring out the problem and putting a fix in place.</p>
All of this makes me realize that aside from the Universal Blue project, there are very few atomic-style distributions available for general use. OpenSUSE does have one, which I have tried and do recommend, and there is also Vanilla Linux. I'm not sure what you call NixOS</em>, but it's kind of atomic/immutable. Still none of the "big-time" Linux entities are as all in</em> on atomic as Fedora (and eventually, I hope, CentOS and RHEL).</p>
I'm still intent on giving Atomic Fedora a longer run as my main OS, and I am glad to finally be back on track</em> with updates and a (hopefully continual) lack of screen-freezing bugs.</p>


In Zola, draft = true works in the front matter
2025-02-28T00:00:00+00:00
I have used draft = true</code> in my Hugo</a> front matter as long as I have been running that static site generator.</p>
Will adding draft = true</code> to the front matter of a Zola</a> post keep the system from building it?</p>
I tried it, and it works.</p>
To make the post appear, either delete draft = true</code>, or change it to draft = false</code>.</p>


Zola test: Can you group taxonomies in front matter?
2025-02-28T00:00:00+00:00
Can you group tags and categories under a [taxonomies]</code> section in your Zola post's front matter rather than listing them under taxonomies.tags</code> and taxonomies.categories</code>?</p>
Yes you can.</p>
This post's front matter went from:</p>
+++</span>
</span>title </span>= </span>"</span>Zola test: Can you group taxonomies in front matter?</span>"
</span>date </span>= </span>2025-02-28
</span>
</span>taxonomies</span>.</span>tags </span>= </span>[
</span>    </span>"</span>front matter</span>"</span>,
</span>    </span>"</span>toml</span>"</span>,
</span>]
</span>taxonomies</span>.</span>categories </span>= </span>[
</span>    </span>"</span>Zola</span>"
</span>]
</span>+++</span>
</span></code></pre>
to:</p>
+++</span>
</span>title </span>= </span>"</span>Zola test: Can you group taxonomies in front matter?</span>"
</span>date </span>= </span>2025-02-28
</span>
</span>[taxonomies]
</span>
</span>tags </span>= </span>[
</span>    </span>"</span>front matter</span>"</span>,
</span>    </span>"</span>toml</span>"</span>,
</span>]
</span>categories </span>= </span>[
</span>    </span>"</span>Zola</span>"
</span>]
</span>+++</span>
</span></code></pre>
The second one, with [taxonomies]</code> seems cleaner, and that's what I'm going to use.</p>


Observations about the Zola static site generator after a month
2025-02-25T00:00:00+00:00
I thought I'd have a lot more posts here over the last month than the one that appeared when I started this site. But aiming to make this blog more "real" and researched has stalled my effort to finish the entry on how I fixed my theme's RSS code so either or both of the atom.xml</code> and rss.xml</code> feeds render.</p>
That post will appear. Eventually. But now it's time for quantity, not quality.</p>
What's my general feeling</em> about Zola</a>? At this point I am mostly comparing it to (what I know about) Hugo</a>.</p>
At no time have I been a super-active Hugo blogger, but I have maintained Hugo sites with a handful of themes for a few years at this point. I always mean to write more</em>. I don't create as many social media posts as I used to, but I still write a fair amount (on ruby.social</a> and gts.passthejoe.net</a>.</p>
There's a certain ease in writing and publishing on social media sites. You type into a box, add a link and a few hashtags and click "Publish." Blogs have a lot of options, but it should still be easier to put an entry together that it is right now for everything from WordPress to Hugo and Zola. Social media software has taken away a lot of the friction</em> of putting your thoughts out into the world, and I think blogging should try to get in on that simplicity and ease.</p>
It's all about getting the idea out there quickly and with as little fiddling as possible.</p>
Could Zola help me in this regard? This part of the blogging workflow is just about the same in Hugo. Both are static site generators. One is coded with Golang, the other with Rust. For my purposes, that doesn't matter very much.</p>
Users of all the SSGs seem to gravitate toward a git-based workflow. You write the posts locally and commit them to a remote git repository, where a CI/CD system (continuous integration/continuous deployment??) builds the site and makes it available to a web server.</p>
That's more complexity than I want. I'm running my Zola site the same way I run Hugo: I have everything on my laptop — mirrored from there to two other local systems via Syncthing</a>. I write the posts, build the site and then send the public files to the web server via an rsync script.</p>
As I do when I discover (or return to) a static site generator, I look at all the themes and try to find something that looks and works as much like I want it to as possible.</p>
That part is harder than it looks.</p>
As I wrote in the first post</a> on this site, I went for the Hook</a> theme.</p>
It does fulfill a lot of my wants</em> in a blog theme, and since I've started, I have been able to:</p>

Add my byline to entries</li>
Fix the rendering of atom.xml</a> and rss.xml</a> feeds</li>
Use the [taxonomies]</code> section in front matter to simplify the use of categories and tags in posts</li>
Confirm that draft = true</code> and draft = false</code> works in front matter for posts</li>
</ul>
With Hook, I can easily add pages to the links list, either in config.toml</code> or in post front matter. Pages for tags</a> and categories</a> are already there. The main page</a> [won't be clogged with entries, and there's an archive page</a> where everything will live.</p>
I can run zola serve</code> to see how it's going to look, and then create the html with zola build.</code> It's all super fast.</p>
So far, the relative simplicity of Zola has been one of its biggest draws. I'm able to figure out</em> themes and modify them non-destructively</em> by copying template files from /themes/zola-hook/templates</code> into /templates</code> and working on them over there.</p>
And while Zola doesn't have a lot of documentation, it also doesn't have a lot of unhelpful documentation</code>. I'm picking up a lot by looking at other themes — especially those maintained by the Zola project</a> — and from the Tera template engine</a>'s own documentation</a>.</p>
Zola 0.20 was just released, and it's hard to see if there were any significant changes. The project moves slow. Releases aren't coming out all the time like with Hugo, and if the project stays slow and steady — as opposed to abandoned — I will be happy. Like Hugo, Zola is flexible and programmable. The same number of batteries are not included, but there are more than enough for what I'm trying to do.</p>
(To be continued ...)</em></p>


Hello Zola
2025-01-28T00:00:00+00:00
I have been experimenting with Zola sites pretty heavily this past week, creating and destroyed slightly south of 10 of them.</p>
I have been a Hugo user for a few years at this point, so the concept of a static site generator that runs with a single binary file is something I'm comfortable with. I tend to find Hugo themes puzzling</em>. I want to know how the pages come together so I can make the changes I want. Maybe Zola will provide that.</p>
The one thing that users talk about is the difference in the templating language between Hugo and Zola. Plus Zola is supposed to be a simpler system. Whether that's by design, or just because it's a younger project with fewer developers, I don't know.</p>
After looking at a couple dozen Zola themes</a>, I tried a few out. One thing I'm discovering from looking at themes is that you can modify one by pulling ideas and code from another.</p>
My theme requirements are:</p>

Simple, readable design</li>
Not heavy with JavaScript</li>
Not too geeky (as in don't show the Markdown #</code> in post titles)</li>
List at least a few posts on the home page</li>
Has working RSS (a surprisingly tall order, though I now know why), preferably with full text</li>
Has pages for a post archive, tags and categories</li>
</ul>
For now I'm using the Hook</a> theme. It hits most of these requirements pretty well, though it won't render an RSS feed until I figure out how to update the code.</p>
One of the cool features of Zola is the ability to override the templates in your theme by dropping files with the same template names and paths into your project installation's template file (in your local directories). I copied page.html</code> from /my-local-zola-directory/themes/zola-hack/templates</code> to /my-local-zola-directory/templates</code>, and from there I added the code needed to make an author's name appear on posts. I started with code from the after-dark</a> theme and added a line so the global author (set in config.toml</code>) would appear.</p>
Here is the code I added to /templates/page.html</code>:</p>
<</span>p class</span>=</span>"</span>secondary small</span>"</span>>
</span>    {</span>% if</span> page.extra.author </span>%</span>}
</span>        By {{ page.extra.author }}
</span>    {</span>%</span> elif config.extra.author </span>%</span>}
</span>        By {{ config.extra.author }}
</span>    {</span>% else %</span>}
</span>        By {{ config.author }}
</span>    {</span>%</span> endif </span>%</span>}
</span></</span>p</span>>
</span></code></pre>
That was enough to get my byline on this post.</p>
To explain the code, it's classic if/else if/else</code> logic that goes in this order:</p>
page.extra.author</code> is displayed if this code is in the front matter of the post:</p>
+++</span>
</span>[extra]
</span>author </span>= </span>"</span>Rex Reed</span>"
</span>+++</span>
</span></code></pre>
I haven't tested it yet, but I assume that config.extra.author</code> displays if that same code above is in config.toml</code>.</p>
And what's displaying on this post (for now anyway) is config.author</code>, which is in config.toml</code> like this:</p>
author </span>= </span>"</span>Rex Reed</span>"
</span></code></pre>
The Zola documentation for Page</a> is very helpful, especially in terms of what you can do with front matter on a post.</p>
Another page on the Zola documentation that I have been referring to is Configuration</a>, which goes over things that you can put in config.toml</code>. It lists all the defaults, which really helped me. That's where I learned how to tell Zola to generate RSS feeds and set an author name.</p>
I also learned from the Configuration page that if you flip from false to true on external_links_target_blank = false</code>, all of your links set with Markdown will automatically be coded with target=_blank</code> and rel="noopener"</code> and will open in a new browser tab when clicked.</p>
Another thing this page tells me is that the built-in search is pretty nice, and in a way I'm sorry my current theme isn't using it. I did try it with the after-dark</a> theme, and it is an impressive feature.</p>
The [slugify]</code> section on the Configuration documentation page</a> lists this Zola default:</p>
# Whether to remove date prefixes for page path slugs.
</span># For example, content/posts/2016-10-08_a-post-with-dates.md => posts/a-post-with-dates
</span># When true, content/posts/2016-10-08_a-post-with-dates.md => posts/2016-10-08-a-post-with-dates
</span>paths_keep_dates </span>= </span>false
</span></code></pre>
Once I saw this, I started doing my dates in file names like this — 2025-01-29</code> — instead of the way I usually do them: 2025_0129</code>. That cleaned up my URLs right away.</p>
It's interesting that the Hugo Bear Blog theme</a> that I'm using in Hugo right now</a> also cuts off the dates (which are on most of the files in my usual format (2025_0129</code>).</p>
I think</em> this is the code in hugo.toml</code> that makes this happen (but I can't be sure until I toggle it):</p>
[permalinks]
</span>  </span>blog </span>= </span>"</span>/:slug/</span>"
</span>  </span>tags </span>= </span>"</span>/blog/:slug</span>"
</span></code></pre>
It was quite a discovery with Hugo Bear Blog that this is something you could easily do. I really like having the dates in the file names because it helps me know how old a post is on my local computer without needing to open it and look at the date. But it's redundant on the live site where the blog generator puts dates on everything and renders it in order.</p>
I'm glad this is the default in Zola (and works when you code the dates right in your source files).</p>
Back to my RSS issue with Zola: I think I can coax the Hook theme into rendering an RSS feed. I know what the problem is: the options for RSS feeds in Zola changed in the 0.19 release, and there is old code in the theme. But can I fix it? I will try.</p>


Is free, hosted blogging the answer?
2024-10-16T00:00:00+00:00
Dave Winer makes me think</a>. He’s creating tools that work with (I presume) the WordPress and Mastodon APIs in order to make the writing experience better and the publishing experience seamless.</p>
With the kind of flexibility that exists on WordPress.com, you can host for free with a subdomain on wordpress.com, or for between $4 and $25 per month</a> (aka $48-$300 per year) for your own domain.</p>
There are a lot of extras, many available with the free plan. There’s a newsletter feature — both free and paid. WP also gives you a presence on the Fediverse that somehow hooks into potential comments (and which is a bit hard to understand at this point).</p>
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been a “serious” WordPress.com blogger, though I have a lot of entries on this site and have created at least a half-dozen WP blogs for other people over the years.</p>
There’s something to be said for a free site where you don’t have to worry about maintenance.</p>
Considering what hosting costs, $48 a year is pretty reasonable, though it’s hard to beat $0, which is what I’m paying now.</p>
I have $0 hosting on a couple of tilde sites</a>, and if they did disappear, I could always move to another one. But WordPress.com seems to be in it for the long haul. I’d love to know officially if dormant blogs from decades past remain live. (Note from 8/2025: I've been told the answer is "yes.")</em></p>
And much like Dave, I’d love a tool that lets me post to WordPress without having to be in WordPress. (Note from 8/2025: Dave did develop this. It's called Wordland</a>.)</em></p>
The elephant in the room this week/month is WordPress BDFL (or maybe NSBDFL) Matt Mullenweg’s trademark dispute/shakedown/war against hosting provider WP Engine. You don’t like to see it, and if you’ve ever had a peek behind the Automattic curtain, what you see isn’t necessarily what you want to have seen.</p>
One thing a system like WordPress does for a writer is make it easy to just write and get the formatting done with as little mucking as possible.</p>
Later: I returned to this post in the WP mobile app. In the WP world, things are set up for you. Writing and editing on the phone Are there third-party apps that already exist that allow me to write and edit WP entries in a quick/dirty/easy way?</p>


WordPress import is powerful, mysterious — what it says (and what I’m saying) about the past, present and future of online expression
2020-06-14T00:00:00+00:00
I recognize that the title of this post is absurd. I intended to write about WordPress Import and how it makes it so easy to move thousands of posts and images from one WP site to another. But the post took a turn into what we should do about everything we write online.</em></p>
I should probably split this into two posts. Instead I’ll just ask you to go along for the ride. I’m adding this forward on my phone with the WordPress mobile app, and that’s another piece of the WP ecosystem that benefits both .com (Automattic’s WordPress hosting service) and .org (self-hosted) users alike.</em></p>

I’ve always been skeptical of how you move content from one WordPress site to another. I’m about to move an entire installation, and I think there should be a lot less mystery and a lot more “here’s how you do it.” Maybe I’m missing something.</p>
I always worry: What if my entries come over to the new site but my images are all on the old one, and I have a thousand posts with links to a site that’s going to go away.</p>
So I did a test. I took the entries from two self-hosted WordPress.org blogs and exported them in the usual WP XML format. I uploaded those two XMLs to this WordPress.com blog, and all the entries, images and comments came along with it. Somehow the Import function was able to grab all those JPGs, stash them in the new system and rewrite the links in the posts. That’s the holy grail of blog migration.</p>
The WordPress documentation should really be shouting from its rooftops about how well this works.</p>
It works so well when moving from a WordPress.org site to WordPress.com. Does it work as well going from a WordPress.org to another WordPress.org, or from a .com to a .org?</p>
Why did I move about 2,000 posts from a couple of .orgs to this .com? For one thing, I can’t believe that those two particular .org blogs (over which I don’t have control) are still live. I had to get the posts — and the image and comments — while I still could. Now I have them on this .com, and I trust WordPress to pretty much keep this site going forever.</p>
(Update on Oct. 16, 2024: Both of the .org sites are now dead; I’m glad I pulled the posts when I did.)</em></p>
My plan was to somehow convert these posts into a format that could be used in a Hugo static-site blog. I could still do that, but then I’d be on the hook for hosting them forever. I can probably do that as long as I’m alive. Who knows what happens after that?</p>
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t Shakespeare or Plato or anything like that. It’s just my once-daily musings. It’s probably too tech-heavy, and it definitely says something about what’s wrong with me as a person that I focused (and let’s be real, still focus) on tech and not other parts of life. If I were to analyze it, I’d say that tech is a “safe space” for me and my mind, and that’s why I do it and write about it.</p>
That was a little heavy. I’d like to write more like that last paragraph and less like the 2,000 entries surrounding it. Be that as it may. I think it’s important not just for me but for all of us to write and have that writing survive.</p>
The Internet Archive notwithstanding, there’s a huge “here today, gone tomorrow” theme in web-based projects and technologies, and most of us have written (blogged, tweeted, Facebooked, MySpaced, Google Plussed) in so many different places, at the behest of companies large and small. So many things go away. WordPress — in its “dot-com” form at http://wordpress.com — is one of the more consistent players out there. I wish hosting your own (which I have done and will continue to do) were as reliable. The slings and arrows of domain hosts (I’m fighting this battle right now), shared hosting, cloud computing and startup birth, acquisition and death — and our own changing obsessions and attentions — make for a complicated road if keeping our content visible and accessible is the goal.</p>
Many of us blog/post/comment in dozens of places. Over the years, so much goes away. My blogPoster</a> project is an attempt to address this. Just the act of mirroring a Twitter (and now Mastodon) post on a self-hosted site is me saying, “I give you this content, huge web service, but I also keep a copy for myself.” We should all be keeping these copies, and it shouldn’t be so hard to do it. Thanks go to WordPress.com and Automattic for being one company that makes it easy.</p>
passthejoe by Steven Rosenberg

Using the Obsidian notetaking app to write posts for Zola

Is Standard Notes worth $90 to $120 a year?

Red Hat employee wanted to leave US. Company said no. Now key GNOME components are unmaintained

From Timothée Ravier: What’s new for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora 44

Iotas and Nextcloud Notes sync

Why is it so hard (or impossible) to get a clean Markdown export out of Obsidian and Standard Notes?

QOwnNotes and Iotas sync with Nextcloud in two different ways

Iotas is a GNOME Circle notetaking app that is a pretty good fit for writing blog posts

How to evaluate a notetaking app</h2> Does it support Markdown?</li> Will it export a file?</li> Can it do checkboxes?</li>

Folio is a pretty basic notetaking app

How good is the Folio notetaking app?

More about QOwnNotes

The Duplicate Note script in QOwnNotes copies Zola's TOML front matter into a new post

Solved: Why Zola wouldn't build my blog

Creating a Zola blog post in Joplin. It didn't go so well

Another Zola post created with the Folio notetaking app

QOwnNotes has Vim mode

Custom note names in QOwnNotes

A Zola post created in the Folio notetaking app

This is a Zola post that started in QOwnNotes

Derek Sivers' minimal .vimrc is only 4 lines long

Getting rid of old tech

One month with the Aeon Desktop: An immutable Linux distribution that uses openSUSE Tumbleweed packages

I ordered new typewriter ribbons in unusual colors

A couple CSS tweaks makes Zola's Hook theme easier on the eyes

I bought an HP Envy laptop in 2017, and it has been my daily driver for 8 years

Linux and BSD theory: 6-month upgrades offer a different kind of 'stability' than waiting 2, 3 or 5 years

Testing new and keeping old Linux distros in 2025

How to get the Foliate ebook reader Flatpak to work

I now have an 'official' Linux terminal in Android

Los Angeles Sanitation holiday trash collection

Broken time: Bill Evans and Miles Davis

Zola for Note Taking by Bhavani Shankar

Evangelina Mascardi plays Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E-flat major BWV 998 on the Baroque lute

Find all the lute articles at earlymusicreview.com without a bunch of flute articles creeping into the search

How to create RSS/Atom feeds in Zola for your tags, categories and any other taxonomies you've set up

A rough week for Fedora Kinoite users (at least for this one)

In Zola, draft = true works in the front matter

Zola test: Can you group taxonomies in front matter?

Observations about the Zola static site generator after a month

Hello Zola

Is free, hosted blogging the answer?

WordPress import is powerful, mysterious ­— what it says (and what I’m saying) about the past, present and future of online expression

WordPress import is powerful, mysterious — what it says (and what I’m saying) about the past, present and future of online expression
