As a relative newbie to Java and Velocity templates, some absolute pain I’ve endured is Velocity insisting on interpreting $ as a variable even when it’s included in JavaScript. The app I’m working on uses a lot of Alpine, and so the magics like $dispatch, $el and similar get interpreted into Velocity-side variables! Turns out there’s a simple solution: wrapping your code in a special ‘include but do not parse’ syntax:

One thing my blog doesn’t currently handle at all well is OpenGraph images. After some reading, the best example of someone doing this I can find is Hussein Al Abry at zidhuss.tech. I’ve used wkhtmltoimage before, so I’ve got some familiarity there. I’d prefer to generate them at build time rather than using something like a Cloudflare Worker to create them on the fly. Perhaps I’ll try to implement this. It feels like it should be a core functionality of an engine as powerful and established as Hugo!

I’m trying to work on my ratio of creating to consuming. I’ve refactored this blog to add the new Shorts section to allow me to post more short-form entries without the weight of a full blog post. This still doesn’t feel like enough though - I want a way of writing from my phone and from my desktop. I do a lot of writing in Obsidian, and I read Gautham Shankar’s post on blogging from Obsidian, but it isn’t going to work on mobile, and I don’t want to have to open my laptop or go out to my office every time I want to capture something like this post.