Link Me Like One Of Your French URLs
I’ve only just mentioned that I’m pausing the imports but not pausing new posts, but I wanted to note that at this point I’m likely moving off of Pika, although I’ve no idea when or how that will happen. The circumstances very much are of an “it’s not them, it’s me” variety.
What pulled me to Pika to begin with is its simplicity and the fact that it can’t tempt me into endless tinkering because outside of a little CSS there’s nothing with which to tinker. It’s unmentioned, I think, in the series of meta posts leading to when I stopped blogging back in March, but one of the things I’d come to realize was that tinkering damages my calm.
So, the allure of a simple blogging platform with a straightforward editor that also accepts pasted Markdown (important for my import process), and with no access to template files and the like should be pretty obvious.
Here’s where I rushed, though: I absolutely loathe blog posts without date-based permalinks. When blogging got consumed by content marketing, SEO hackers hucksters insisted that any and all references to publication dates be stricken from the visual record in order to fool search engines into thinking that your posts were forever fresh, in perpetuity.
I hated it then and I hate it now.
Blog permalinks should contain human-readable temporal data. It’s a hill on which I’m willing to die metaphorically.
Pika, for its part, has a weird sort of hybrid approach, wherein permalinks for titled posts have no dates in them but those for untitled posts do. The latter uses the same YYYY-MM-DD-slug format as all posts use on Good Enough’s own blog, which itself hasn’t yet transitioned to Pika due to a lack of support for multiple authors.
(I’ve actually grown somewhat fond of that format, too, versus the typical one that suggests there should be year, month, and date archive pages. It’s unclear to me these days how much such archive pages are necessary, but then let’s see what I think if and when I’ve successfully imported several thousand posts and the links to them all have to load on a single page.)
Let me reiterate: the user experience on Pika is pretty terrific. I’ve no actual qualms with what they’re building, except in that I’ve realized it doesn’t meet my use case, and on the matter of permalinks I gather it never will. Let me also clarify: there’s nothing inherently or, you know, morally wrong with blog permalinks that don’t convey date information. I just think it’s not what’s best for blogs, and certainly it’s not what’s best for mine.
It’s true that for as much as I’m a stickler for date-based permalinks for blogs, my own actual permalinks format has changed over time, somewhat contradicting the idea of being permanent links. My hope and intention is that upon my next platform move, I’ll settle into a format once and for all.
That said, I’ve nothing lined up. I can’t actually find a dead-simple, no-tinkering blogging platform that understands Markdown and uses date-based permalinks. It’d come as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading me for some time that I’m inevitably running into being an unsupported use case, both when it comes to blogging and when it comes to living.
It’s too bad, because I quite like the basic theme Pika sets forth for you, and the fact that all you can do is fiddle with the CSS, and I like what I’ve done with it. I possibly could stomach the irksome way their editor handles lists (putting paragraphs in all items, rather than doing so only based upon how you actually construct the lists, as the Markdown itself does) if I could have date-based permalinks for all posts.
Anyway, I’ll be gritting my teeth and continuing to post to these dateless URLs for the foreseeable, while I flail about in search of a solution.
Addenda
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This afternoon, amidst the regular fatigue, the post-vaccinations malaise, and the morning insomnia, I spent some time looking into whether or not I could sufficiently replicate close to my my basic layout here on Pika back over on Weblog.LOL (without simply stealing Pika’s theme), and then use CSS trickery in Safari to hide the templates from view so I wouldn’t feel easily tempted to tinker.
In something less than an hour I was exactly as dysregulated and anxious as I was trying to avoid, so that’s probably a no-go.
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This evening I did get pretty close under Weblog.LOL to aping the Pika theme without using any of Pika’s code, but that’s still not okay because the design itself is Pika’s, whatever the HTML and CSS that gets you there. So even if I end up moving back to Weblog.LOL, I’m going to have to figure out a simple “set it and forget it” theme to use that’s sufficiently satisfying to me.