I've been pretty quiet on here recently. A lot has been happening - most significantly, I have moved house and moved out of Edinburgh. I'm now living in a small village on the edge of the city, called Balerno. The move has been a little fraught, at times, and I still have some doubts as to whether it was the right thing to do. But for now, I have a much bigger flat, my own front and rear gardens, with trees all around me and the Water of Leith just meters from my front door.
I've also started a new job, a promotion of sorts. Same department, same team, more senior position. Like the house move, I'm still evaluating if it was the right decision.
Between the house and the job, I haven't had a lot of time, nor energy, to develop bascule further. Not that I need more from Bascule; it works fine for this website. While there are some quality of life improvements I could add, or further markdown or handlebars extensions I could put together, there's nothing else I really need it to do.
One weakness, for now, is that it is not very portable. To build this website, I need both the bascule Java JAR file, and the source folder which contains all my markdown, CSS, JS and images. That's all stored locally on my computer at home, though I do have it synced to a private github repository. It would be great if bascule could generate the website not from the local filesystem, but from github directly. Better still, if I could then publish directly to my web-host (I must get round to writing the 'publish' part of bascule...).
Let's take this even further. At work, we've been doing some work with cloud services. What if I could run bascule from the cloud itself? Could I transform the application into an AWS Lambda function, and execute it from anywhere in the world? Could a Lambda hook into my Github account, and trigger a generation whenever a new commit is made? I should probably move this website to be hosted by Amazon S3 in that case.
If I manage to tie this together and get it to work, it could form the basis of a music-themed website project I've been discussing with my father. He's thinking about a pretty straightforward static website, of the type we could knock together in WordPress in a day, but there's nothing interesting in doing that. If I can bend bascule to my cloud ambitions, I could create a website he could edit online without ever having to learn markdown or how to use bascule.
If only I could find the time - and the energy - to make this work.