About
I’m Leon, and This day’s portion is my personal blog. There’s also a website for the professional me.
I write about lots of things – mainly designing and building things online, but also politics, books, music and other cultural stuff.
At the moment I seem to be writing about writing and publishing a lot, which may or may not be of interest over time.
I used to post everything to leonpaternoster.com, but that’s now just where you find the work me. I still believe in blogging and, at the very least, writing and hitting publish is good for me.
I’m interested in publishing to and exploring the indieweb.
Contact
If you’d like to get in touch, email mail@thisdaysportion.com Alternatively, you can follow me on
I’m also on LinkedIn, but the whole point of this website is to not be like I’m on LinkedIn.
About this site
As I write so much about writing and building this site, some words on its workings are in order.
Firstly, it’s built on a static site generator called Jekyll. Traditional static sites (as opposed to single page applications) do all the heavy lifting of building web pages before a person visits them. This means they’re fast and stable as they’re served “as is” and complete.
The downside is they lack the interactivity and dynamism of pages that are built when a person does something on the page. For example, if you wanted to see the latest local weather on a static page, you’d be out of luck – it could only show you the weather when the author created the page.
On a dynamic page there’d be lots going on behind the scenes – you could choose a location, perhaps, and then your request would go off to a server and database, which would return the relevant information and the page would be rebuilt with the results of your location request, there and then.
Now, there are ways to serve static pages but still enjoy interactive features such as comments, and that’s what I like to explore on this website. I’ll often write about these processes, and you can browse the code on Github.
You might ask why? I bother with this, which would be a fair enough question. If you’re just looking to get up and blogging on the indieweb, you would be far better off using either WordPress or micro.blog, two excellent services with comments, webmentions etc. built in.
There are three answers to this question. Firstly, I enjoy tinkering with this blog, and it gives me a chance to develop skills such as wrangling with APIs. Secondly, I’ve been using Jekyll for six years – it’s what I know. Finally, there is a place for traditional static sites out there, and this site, in its own very small way, helps demonstrate that.
What else might you need to know? I use Forestry as a “headless” CMS to publish and edit content – I can’t recommend it enough – and Netlify as my host (ditto). Both services work with Github, which provides versioning, backups and rollbacks. Webmention and Bridgy handle accepting links from other sites, which you’ll see listed on some posts under the Mentions heading.
This set up is free, until the site gets hammered with comments and mentions :-)
This day’s portion?
Ambitious (tone – declamatory):
Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day’s portion every day – Exodus 16:4
And personal, referential (also declamatory):
Little boys are taking over
They mumble through the grass
They are not fit to be in the company
Of vulperines and wolverines
Too many heads knocking about
Service
This day’s portion
This day’s portion
This day’s portion
This day’s portion
– Service, The Fall