the otherblog

The first post on otherblog

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736268+00:00

This has been a while in the making. I built a new CMS within my site using Flask to...well, mainly...let me write online again.

This site is already using Flask for some tasks, but it was done mainly for a graduate school requirement. Since finishing my master's degree, I ripped out a lot of the stuff I had to add and left it pretty much alone. Just about a year ago, I added comments to my static site by setting up a small database here. It works well and I was happy to have that added function.

I've been using Pelican since 2023 for my main blog and I like the static site, but I missed being able to just pop open a form and fire off some thoughts. So, here I am.

I'm keeping it separate for now. Welcome to otherblog.

I'm not sure how long that will be, but it is what it is. It's got RSS set up, so you can subscribe to posts if you want updates.

Much of this new site's layout was heavily inspired by Leon Paternoster. Sorry Leon. Thanks Leon. I hope we get to meet someday.

Link: AI Isn't Killing Learning

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736247+00:00

I came across a post this morning on why AI isn't killing learning. Educators are good at the blame game and I think the overall premise of the post is correct - we need to constantly revise what we do along with our methods, but that's standard practice, not just in response to new tech.

I think he missed the point on skill building, though. I cannot just look at a series of prompts a student gives an LLM to determine what they know or don't know. There is still a place for fundamental knowledge and building skills to develop fluency.

Link: Writing Python Like It's Rust

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736225+00:00

Original Link

I've never looked at Rust, but I'm aware of why it is so well liked. My Python projects are all for my own enjoyment, but I feel like these patterns are things I can learn to use just to make my own code cleaner. I've got the tab open on my phone and I'll come back to it when I do some more work on the backend here to finish up some stuff that needs polishing.

Productivity Nexus

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736190+00:00

I fell into the productivity nexus several years ago. I think it was a symptom of not having a teaching position and needing to be able to justify the work I was doing. I tracked all the things, figured out oblique systems to plan out and quantify my hours of time spent on whatever I was doing.

Now that I'm back to teaching, I realize how much energy I spent on tracking and how little effect I think I actually had. I'm in a new district, teaching, and my to-do list lives on a legal pad. I look at that old district and I feel like I wasted several years of opportunity to actually make meaningful differences with people, not just my time ledger.

Getting into Break

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736172+00:00

I'm having a hard time turning my brain off this week. Nothing school specific, but I feel like I can't just relax. I feel like I should be doing something but it's like I can't recognize that resting - reading, listening to music, etc - is doing the resting.

Still Thinking About Migrating

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736152+00:00

I've had this little space up for a few weeks and I still haven't decided if I should migrate all of my existing posts over or not. I'm liking being able to fire off quick posts here and there, but I'm worried about losing the old stuff in a move. It would take some wrangling to make sure I don't break every link accidentally. I also don't love having two spaces to think about. What belongs where? Does it matter?

A few strokes too far

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736121+00:00

I'm painting almost every day and I'm still taking things a few strokes too far. My latest was good and then I tried to darken more, which muddied it all up. Lightness!

Adding neighbor navigation

2026-01-15T14:33:10.736085+00:00

I did a little work on the site tonight and got neighbor post navigation added to the bottom of each individual post. I learned in the process that SQLite doesn't allow parentheses in SQL UNION statements, so I can't get the previous and next posts in one call using SQLAlchemy.

My database is tiny, so it doesn't really matter, but it was a struggle because the error wasn't clear about where the problem was coming from and it took a while to get everything working.

Importer progress...

2026-01-15T14:33:10.735985+00:00

I spent some time tonight putting together a script to import all of my existing blog posts. They're in a directory of files, some exported from Wordpress way back when formatted as reStructuredText while most everything from the last two years is in Markdown files. This has been tough because the docutils library has less than clear documentation on how to use it. I think I've finally turned a corner and the end is in sight.

There's some more to do here for a clean rollover, like getting post categories set up, but that won't be hard at all because the groundwork is already laid. I also need to do some work either having post URLs include year and month URL paths or learning about how to do that on the server with a URL rewrite.