Now page

Inspired by Bryan Braum's /now page, my site now also features a "now page", which you can find in the sidebar!

Feel free to check it out for my June update; going forward, I'm making myself a calendar event to update it around the same time every month.

Technical details

Implementation-wise, the /now page was relatively simple to make; just throw a markdown file in a folder and watch as my website generator converts it to a real page on the website.

Adding an Atom feed to it was a bit trickier; as it required me to modify the feed generator to be able to add the listing / index page as a post in the feed. As explained on Bryan's blog, adding a feed for a single page mostly involves wrapping that page in the relevant Atom/RSS tags, and updating the ID of the feed entry whenever you change the content (so it shows up as a new post).

Following his lead, I have made the feed for my /now page consist of a single post, which gets replaced by the new post whenever I update the uuid in the page. That way, I can make minor edits keep the same post, while major updates would show up as a new entry for anyone subscribed to the feed.

Contents

The whole point of "now pages" is to showcase what a person is currently focused on in life; in the sense of "what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year".

As such, my /now page lists various silly and less silly details, some of which might make sense only to people who've known me for a while, while others might shed more light and context on things around the site. I decided to make use of the page to mention a few of the things I'm currently going through, like college, which would take a while for me to write a blog post about them.

At the same time, since the /now page is ephemeral and provides no access to old posts (other than through Git history), it makes it easier to share imperfect opinions than any forever-accessible blog page ever might.

But, that's it for now. Feel free to go ahead and explore what's on there; while I go back to focusing on the things I wrote about on that page 😂

This is my 13th post of #100DaysToOffload. Writing website update posts feels almost like cheating the challenge, but it's good to have a few backup topics like that.