Tim's (still) not blogging

Eleventy ugh

I really want to like this (even though I hate javascript, it's at least a devil I know, and I'm even less interested in running python or ruby), but I have some quibbles.

Dates

I spent a long time on day 1 looking for how to get eleventy to put the post date in the permalink, because I don't just want a flat folder of title-named files like

I think I want year folders and then dates like

Turns out, you just organize your files that way. So I was just barking up the wrong tree.

It then took some time to find that a date in the filename is used if found, so you don't need to set a date in thr frontmatter.

BUT if you dig into dates, a date by itself implies midnight UTC, which is almost never correct and is the kind of batty assumption you make if you're either addled with brainworms or are using a language with no concept of dates beyond treating them as a wrapper around a unix timestamp. I'm definitely not interested in building this myself, but if I did, a timeless date should be treated as a date without an implied time.

Sidebar: I think I want my blog times to always be in my local time, but what if I blog from a different timezone? I think that could just be posted as that local time, without any differentiation. That breaks down a little if this is a time-relevant post, but even then, the local time is my time at the time, so it's still not wrong.

The second place where eleventy is bonkers about dates is that if you don't date-name your files, posts will be sorted by the file's modification time. So if you decide to go back and add a tag some old posts, they all shift to the front? That's bananas, and if I followed a blog that did that, I would consider it an unsubscribe-level betrayal.

Alt, right?

The third thing that almost has me leaving is that an image without an alt attribute is a fatal error that blocks publishing. Yeah, I survived the XHTML wars on the losing side, and even I think that's a bridge too far. Please feel free to warn me very loudly on every build, but this is the web, where the rules are mostly guidelines and browsers will try to render any garbage that's even remotely parsable, so you don't get to shut me down because I copied an image from my tumblr export that didn't have alt text.