Writing a VS Code extension requires understanding how activation works and where state is stored. The Activation Events page in the documentation has a good explanation of how it works. The default sample uses only the onCommand event binding which is not what I need for my extension (and actually caused me quite a lot of confusion).

Instead, I really need to have it activate when a workspace contains a zola blog. the workspaceContains event uses a glob pattern to look for a file of interest. I think that **/*.config.toml is probably good enough for now, and I could even not activate the extension if I find that it doesn't have the right parameters inside the file. #

vscode-zola now supports emitting shortcodes based on URIs copied from the clipboard. For most cases where I copy a URI for YouTube, Twitter, or Instagram content, the extension will emit the proper zola shortcodes and embed the content within the page, giving a much nicer rendering experience for the reader.

Here's a This Triathlon Life YouTube video that I watched earlier today. Eric and Laura are like characters in a TV show that I watch regularly, usually when I'm riding my bike on the trainer:

Charlie's moved on from Redmond and he's got a temporary home for his cars:

I didn't know this history of grep before - these kinds of stories are what make YouTube great:

Paula vs. Eric in a Specialized Tarmac vs. Epic showdown:

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A post

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After running this blog on GitHub pages over the weekend, I decided to try something new and created a CloudFlare account. While I was having some troubles with GitHub pages occassionally not rendering correctly (something with the DNS entries not being happy with GitHub), I was more curious about CloudFlare and wanted to try being a customer. So I signed up for the free plan.

There's an interesting gateway drug effect with CloudFlare. After getting a free account and using it to protect this blog on GitHub pages, I learned that I could transfer my domain over to CloudFlare from GoDaddy, the registrar that I've been using for the past decade or so. I was attracted by the wholesale cost pricing of CloudFlare which worked out to less than $9/year to continue to manage my iunknown.com domain (which is now 24 years old!) So I went and initiated the transfer process tonight.

I was also curious about JamStack and CloudFlare Pages. It turns out that there's also built-in support for Zola as well. After some misadventures with version numbers (as of this writing, the only supported version is 0.14.0), I finally got builds up and running.

The experience is identical to GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages - I push to my main branch, and the installed CloudFlare Pages GitHub app handles the build and deployment process into the CloudFlare network. The only thing I noticed is that the container(?) that is used to build takes a long time to initialize compared to GitHub Actions. When I look at the logs, it seems like this container is used not just by zola but it installs other static web site generators like Hugo as well. #

I've got a working version of my first VS Code extension, vscode-zola. I'm using it to write this post now. So far, it supports:

• Creating a new post
• Pasting social media URIs and embedding them in the generated page
• A sort-of working Preview Blog service

I'm a bit torn about how the Preview Blog service should behave - right now I'm imagining that it will work like the way VS Code Markdown Preview works - creating a new pane to the right of the editor that shows the preview with a hot-reload function that refreshes every time you save the markdown file. The existing zola serve command works and does auto-refresh in an external browser window too, and it already supports hot reloading.

Some future features that I want to add include:

• Paste image functionality similar to how the Paste Image extension works today, but tailored to how my zola blog's needs (specially formed URIs and using the image shortcode).
• Section permalink - another command that inserts some markdown into the post that generates a # (typically at the end of a logical section) which is also a permalink that users can use to link directly to that part of the post. This is how Scripting News works and I want to make it easy to do so using nothing more than plain-vanilla markdown.

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