4 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
8814f1b0a8 Fixed page titles
All checks were successful
ci/woodpecker/push/woodpecker Pipeline was successful
ci/woodpecker/tag/woodpecker Pipeline was successful
2023-07-08 22:12:32 -04:00
a7edf81e5b Minor change to blog post page
All checks were successful
ci/woodpecker/push/woodpecker Pipeline was successful
ci/woodpecker/tag/woodpecker Pipeline was successful
2023-07-08 00:50:30 -04:00
15a1842ebe Edited some drafts
All checks were successful
ci/woodpecker/push/woodpecker Pipeline was successful
2023-07-08 00:49:28 -04:00
e73fa8d7a5 Removed draft posts' publish dates because they've never been published...
All checks were successful
ci/woodpecker/push/woodpecker Pipeline was successful
2023-07-08 00:21:29 -04:00
10 changed files with 30 additions and 16 deletions

View File

@ -1,21 +1,32 @@
---
layout: post
title: "Farewell, Atom."
description: "Atom was an awesome text editor back in its day, and now GitHub is putting it to rest."
date: 2021-07-17 09:32:11 -0400
tags: text-editors programming foss
title: "Farewell, Atom. Hello Pulsar!"
description: "The awesome community behind the Atom text editor has stepped up and given us a replacement: Pulsar"
tags: pulsar text-editors programming foss
---
Recently, back on June 8th of 2022, GitHub announced that it set an end-of-life of December 15th, 2022 for Atom. What was once a super popular text editor in the mid-2010s that has since fallen behind the times a bit,
About a year ago on June 8th of 2022, GitHub announced that it set an end-of-life of December 15th, 2022 for the Atom text editor. What was once a super popular text editor in the mid-2010s that has since fallen behind the times a bit, is now a relic of the past to later be forgotten. This wasn't too surprising of a move, considering Microsoft purchased GitHub and they already had their own text editor in Visual Studio Code that was stealing Atom's thunder. Honestly it took Microsoft a LOT longer to make this move than I expected, but either way it kinda sucked seeing such a monumental piece of software (remember Electron? That came from Atom!) be put to bed.
### History
## The Community is Awesome. ##
But the open-source community has a habit of not letting go, and for better or worse, a lot of times will put great effort into preserving old experiences. This is one of those such instances, and now we have [Pulsar](https;//pulsar.dev)! This is a fork on Atom that seems to have some steam behind it, not only re-branding it and keeping up the extensions installer, but also actively working on bug fixes and making it better!
It's pretty much a drop-in replacement for Atom, even down to the extensions and settings that you once used. Things can get a little hairy at times but we'll get to that in a bit.
### Technological Advances
## It's going to take some time... ##
Atom brought along with it some pretty awesome technological advances, the primary one being Electron. Initially referred to as "Atom Shell", Electron quickly took off as a way to utilize the open source web browser Chromium as a base for desktop apps, and build on top of it using web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and Node.js.
Now like I alluded to a moment ago, it's a little rough around the edges right now. Just to name a few things:
### Signing Off...
* Automatic updates aren't a thing yet, so you need to check back for new releases - about once per month for the stable releases.
* Installing it on Linux is kinda lame since you just get a raw DEB or RPM file to install manually instead of using a repo or something like Flatpak.
* The Atom codebase had been left to rot for a bit, so there is a lot of API changes and supporting software upgrades to churn through.
Overall, I'm going to miss Atom. Sure, Sublime Text was more performant and VS Code has a much larger community these days, but it still has a place in my heart since I used it for several years when I started getting more serious in my IT career and I thought it was kinda awesome how the community around Atom exploded so quickly. It seemed like Atom's community shot well past that of the other well-established text editors of the time, practically overnight. Plus I always thought the "a hackable text editor for the 21st century" was such a cool slogan. Suffice to say it has a special place in my heart, so I'll simply end this post with "Farewell, Atom."
## The Community is Awesome. ##
You see, the beauty of open-source software isn't necessarily that it's going to be developed better by having more eyeballs on it, nor that you can see exactly what a piece of software is doing. Those can definitely be good things, don't get me wrong, but where open-source really shines is when a company or some organization have had enough of developing a piece of software - I want to be clear I see no wrongdoing in this, sometimes good things just don't make sense - and instead of it just being left to rot, someone in the community can step up and take over. That really is an amazing thing.
## Signing off ##
There's not really much at this point, other than if you haven't yet I'd highly recommend you give Pulsar a try. Like I said it's still wonky in some spots - one thing in particular that I'm noticing as I write this is there's a permanent deprecation warning for an extension since an API changed it needs patched - but for the most part it kinda just works. I would honestly love to see this thing come to fruition with a full-blown community that's actively developing extensions and contributing code to kinda recreate what we once had, and give us a proper text editor that's competitive with VS Code like Atom was.
And yes I know [Zed](https://zed.dev) is a thing from the original Atom devs, but it seems to be moving really slow and is currently only available on Mac, so I can't really use it or recommend it at this time.

View File

@ -2,7 +2,6 @@
layout: post
title: "All Adventures Begin with Microsoft Edge"
description: "This is part one of my Web Switching series, where I'm taking a look at other web browsers to see if I'm going to permanently switch from Mozilla Firefox."
date: 2022-06-09 11:54:26 -0400
tags: web-switched web-browsers microsoft microsoft-edge
---

View File

@ -2,13 +2,12 @@
layout: post
title: "Sinatra (Ruby) is Beautiful."
description: "Sinatra is a beautifully simple web framework. It's old, but it works!"
date: 2023-07-14 09:00:00 -0400
tags: linux
---
By trade I'm a System Administrator/Network Engineer, so most of my days are filled with deploying applications, dealing with oddball software vendors and their lackluster documentation, licensing (yuck!), and planning/building out infrastructure to support operations. But I also like to do some coding on the side, and in particular I like to see what I can build to maybe be useful one day, and in particular I like spinning up web sites/apps.
Thus enters [Sinatra](https://sinatrarb.com/). It's a very simple and lightweight framework for building web applications using a DSL.
And thus [Sinatra](https://sinatrarb.com/). It's a very simple and lightweight framework for building web applications using a DSL.
## The Exciting First Dance! ##

View File

@ -3,7 +3,7 @@
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>{{ page.title }}</title>
<title>{{ page.title }} | Bit Goblin</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/skeleton/2.0.4/skeleton.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/stylesheets/lumbridge.css">
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.6.0/jquery.min.js"></script>

View File

@ -7,4 +7,6 @@ layout: default
{{ content }}
<hr>
<p>If you want to read more posts like this, be sure to subscribe to the <a href="/feed.xml">RSS feed</a>! Else, if you like watching videos then head on over to <a href="{{ site.links.bitgoblin_channel }}">my YouTube channel</a> or follow me over on <a href="{{ site.links.twitch_channel }}">Twitch</a> where I occasionally stream games. Feel free to join the <a href="{{ site.links.discord_invite }}">Bit Goblin community on Discord</a> as it is slowly growing. Finally, if you'd like to support me in my endeavors, head on over to <a href="{{ site.links.patreon_link }}">Patreon</a> and pitch me a few bucks if you can.</p>

View File

@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
---
layout: page
title: Blog
---
<ul id="post-list">

View File

@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
---
layout: page
title: Contact
---
If you're looking to contact me for business inqueries, feel free to email me at [gballantine@bitgoblin.tech](mailto:gballantine@bitgoblin.tech).

View File

@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
---
layout: home
title: Welcome to Bit Goblin!
---
Welcome! My name is Greg Ballantine and Bit Goblin is my passion project for creating YouTube videos on tech. I love tinkering with all things related to computers, and I enjoy documenting the things that I do so that others can use my struggles to ease their own. Whether it's buildings PCs, playing with networking gear, or exploring the beauty of Linux, there are lots of things to play with and try to help others with.

View File

@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
---
layout: page
title: Sponsors
---
These are the sponsors I work with...

View File

@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
---
layout: page
title: Support
---
Unfortunately money doesn't grow on trees, and a lot of the stuff that I purchase to make videos on can be quite expensive. My content is available free-of-charge on YouTube, but if you don't mind helping support me financially any help would be much appreciated.
@ -7,4 +8,3 @@ Unfortunately money doesn't grow on trees, and a lot of the stuff that I purchas
The primary way to support my work is through donations on [my Patreon page](https://patreon.com/BitGoblin). I don't have any reward tiers over there yet, but I do plan on adding some rewards at some point in the future.
You can also support me by [joining Honey using my referral link](https://www.joinhoney.com/ref/9ohqcf9)! Honey helps you save money on popular websites by searching for coupons to get you discounts while you're shopping. And the best part is that it's free!