Still Quick But Less Myopic
Since I'm coming from my last blog, running on WordPress, and all of its various layers, I have perhaps an unhealthy fixation on using only HTML for this blog. I wanted to stay clean and quick.
This approach came at the cost of quite a bit of added complexity for my Blake engine, as I initially added generation of a post-specific table of contents (where the current post is rendered as static text, not a link) to the processing. This meant that each time a new post was published, EVERY existing post page needed to be modified. Which is fine...but, honestly, annoying. Especially because, with the addition of multiple categories (which I began doing manually at the end of last year), there is no longer a single site-wide table of contents. Instead, there is a hierarchy.
This was foreshadowed by one of my earliest posts, where I envisioned a blog containing multiple "sub-blogs", across an eclectic blend of topics I'm interested in. So now the main table of contents, initially accessible from my "Now" page (effectively my "home page"), contains links to the category-specific tables of contents, which, in turn, contain links to all of the posts in their respective category.
All of which is the long way of explaining that I removed the full, post-custom tables of content from each post page and replaced them with a static link to the table of contents for the category the post belongs to. This reduces Blake's workload considerably, as it merely needs to add the new post it is processing to the correct category table of contents and update the affected sibling posts' navigation links (i.e., "previous post" and "next post") accordingly.
It's still processing only a single NEW post at a time, for now, but future versions will focus on processing multiple posts as well as updates to and deletion of existing posts. But now that it can handle publishing a new post in an environment with more than a single, catchall ("miscellaneous") category, these future features will expect the presence of multiple categories. And eventually, when I trust it "enough", it will be granted permission to automatically backup and replace my live production site, as the final step in its process.