PeterSmith.org | Checking with check-ins

Checking with check-ins

I rather like the way Chris Aldrich has check-ins on his website. But my current workflow for posting isn't friendly enough to do it:

Take a photo (or more)
Create a Hugo post (in Emacs, which creates the directory as I'm using page bundles)
Move the photo(s) into the directory
Add the details of the photo's into the post
Publish the whole thing. Yes, I don't have continuous integration going; well I do, but only when I make a commit to git.

There is a lot of friction involved; so much that I couldn't be bothered to do it. But technology is wonderful, ain't it.

I've created a new section at check-ins. A pretty obvious name. I toyed with just creating regular blog posts and tagging them as check-ins, but the formatting is a little different to regular posts, and that drove my decision. That said, I think Chris is using 'regular posts' (based on the URLs he is using).

I spent most of yesterday getting to grips with using Python to access my email provider through IMAP. Which allowed me to create a smoother process.

Take a photo or two
Email them to myself (well, a special email address)
My process-email.py script does some magic
- Scan my inbox for the special email address
- Use the subject as the title of the post
- Create the folder
- Save the photos
- Create a check-in post using the body of the email, and embedding the photos
Publish the whole thing

This flow seems to work for me, and I think it is probably just as easy as using an app or similar (especially once I add a tweaks that follow).

I'm umm-ing and ah-ing about whether I should run the script periodically from cron or just do it manually once in a while.

Things still to do. I have to manually post hoc add tags to the check-in. I think I want to embedded them in the email and parse them out. E.g., Using something like #coffee #travel in the email message, and convert them to tags.

I would also like a smarter way to display the photos. Currently I stack them one on top of the other, but I like how Chris has done some of his. I also need to use something like srcset to get the right size image to the browser, and use a better format for images. E.g., webp.

Finally, I'd like to surface the location. I have the GPS info from the photo's exif data and that will just take a little more processing.

As an aside, I wondering about using this as an opportunity to create something in Go. I've dabbled a little with it in the past, but I've never had something 'real' to do with it. W