This evening I created the 1926 McFate Travel Journal repo from the grinnell-college-CB-base template repo. Now I need a script that will break the primary .md document into smaller chunks, and update them in Azure Blob storage.
So I made the decision last night to implement an instance of CollectionBuilder to document my grandmother Miriam’s 1926 travel journal. I posted this from roughly where that journey began, my grandparent’s old farm in northern Poweshiek County.
This is really just another test of my system as we’re waiting on friends to go walking around the lake that isn’t anymore.
Creating this new post from my phone this morning while I visit the farm.
This test should return an accurate timestamp PLUS a valid “location” and “coordinates” from Drafts.
Thinking ahead, the “Publish Micropost to My Blog” script needs a couple more things:
- The “title:” field should automatically populate from the Draft title (first line) and it should be in TitleCase.
- Coordinates in Toledo or Tama (or other frequent stops) should get location tags without having to call the
PositionStack
API.
I modified the # solovyov.net blog post publish script giving it a new name of Publish Micropost to My Blog
and so far it’s working nicely! It does not insert the location:
or coordinates:
values as I’d like yet, but stay tuned!
Yesterday I took a quick look at a notes-taking app called Obsidian. Very promising, but I’m already invested in Drafts (to the tune of $20/year) and it too has been rapidly improving. So, I joined the Drafts Community and started looking for some guidance. Today I’m going to try implementing one or two things based on Generate Static Site from Drafts Notes. Wish me luck!

My Grandparent's 1926 California Trip Project
In October 1926 my grandparents, Clarence and Miriam Abia McFate, packed their family into what I imagine was a pickup truck with a homemade camper in the bed and embarked on a trip that grandma, Miriam, described as…
Following you will find each day drive as we journey on.
Continue Reading »2025-Feb-2 at 08:54 AM
I hope this is my last installment of “Mackenzie Posts” as the news is all good.
Mackenzie has been back to work part-time since January 7 and I think that’s gone very well. She gets some brain fatigue after a few hours at work and therapy, but that too has been improving. Therapy might be winding down soon as well, she has 2 sessions this coming week and will probably transition to once every couple of weeks after that.
Continue Reading »
Rebranding CV to HAT with Pagefind
Today I’m rebranding the Tama-Toledo Community Visioning (CV) site to Hometown Action Team (HAT) and adding Pagefind.
When doing so I get this build error…
To remove this warning, either update your script and style references to the new /pagefind/
URL
or run Pagefind with --output-subdir _pagefind
to ensure pre-1.0 behaviour