Skip to content
Gilleland.ca
Blog

Blog

Migrating to Astro Starlight

- 1 min read - 132 words
Dan Gilleland
Dan Gilleland
Owner of Gilleland.ca

Note to self: Migrating a website that has sat in disrepair for years is not a trivial task. Here’s some notes for myself on what I should do to “clean up” this site.

Content, Content, Content

Section titled “Content, Content, Content”

Content comes in lots of shapes and sizes, and this site is no exception. So what’s here?

First up, since this is built on Astro Starlight (a starter template for Astro), the setup somewhat assumes the typical documentation needs for some product or service. I’m “re-purposing” that in my site, based on the following use cases:

  • [ ] TBD

Next up, I’ve added in the Starlight Blog plugin. The goal here is to represent the type of content that would constitute a “blog post”. Everyone defines “blogging” in their own way, but here’s what I’m envisioning:

  • [ ] TBD

TBD

- 3 min read - 493 words
Dan Gilleland
Dan Gilleland
Owner of Gilleland.ca

https://www.youtube.com/live/AphvST7k8oA?si=GjlrsH1XGdy2LpRX

Regarding your discussion with Jimmy Akin regarding the Brandon Biggs prophecies, there was one category of possibilities that you didn’t touch on that might be what is in play here. For example, have you ever considered the “prophecy” that God made that didn’t come true?

I’m referring to when David was evading King Saul (1 Samuel 23:7-29). David had gone to Keilah and Saul was informed. David twice asks God, “Will the citizens of Keilah surrender me to him?” (NIV) Both times, God says “Yes.” So David leaves Keilah which (obviously) prevents the “prophecy” from coming true.

Before you cry “foul”, on it being a prophecy given to David (we can call it a “prediction” if you like), consider the nature of the inquiry David makes. He’s asking “What will happen” not to just “make a prediction” but to make a decision. Another example I think of is Jonah with the Ninevites.

Now back to Brandon. He’s mentioned a number of times in various prophecies that he’s been given them “from the Lord” as things to “pray” or “intercede” about. So one option of what’s going on is that God is actually giving (some?) of these to Brandon not with the intent of “post it on YouTube” but to get Brandon (and maybe others?) to PRAY. Is Brandon handling them rightly? Maybe, maybe not, maybe sometimes.

I bring this up not because I’m trying to “bail” Brandon out, but because I want to redirect our understanding of why God gives prophecies to His children and Church. It’s not about turning us into a bunch of little Nostradamuses, but for different purposes altogether. In fact, the biggest impetus any prophesy of Scripture or post-Scripture is to turn people back to God - to call us to repent.

That’s also one of the concerns I have about how we handle what Scripture tells us regarding the signs preceding the return of Jesus. Signs aren’t given to us so that we can wear them as sandwich placards around our necks while we pace up and down main street. They are given to us so that we won’t be caught off guard, and so that we will be the good stewards who are giving the other household servants food at the proper time. (Matthew 24:45-51). Too often, we in the Church have either shied away from any of the prophetic “yet-to-be-fulfilled” parts of Scripture or have tried to shoe-horn the Scriptures into the evening news. Either ditch is a bad place to be, and we need to get back on the road by handling prophecies properly. This is especially important as there do appear to be more signs that Jesus’ return is coming a lot closer than ever before.

So in summary, we should watch how we’re driving. Both ditches are a bad place to be when we’re approaching a bridge.

Sincerely,

Dan

Ah, JavaScript...

- 1 min read - 155 words
Dan Gilleland
Dan Gilleland
Owner of Gilleland.ca

Republished from earlier blog

Normally I wouldn’t expect myself to find a reason to blog about JavaScript. After all, for anyone who’s gone through the browser wars having tried to do html the hard way and be browser friendly, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, & DOM differences would be enough to make one vow never to touch the stuff again, particularly when the easy-to-control server-side .NET programming became available.

But, if you are interested in AJAX, you’ll probably get back to the JavaScript thing again (like I am about to).

So, along that vein, I thought I would note a post by Bertrand Le Roy about a nice, tight-coded way to ensure a JavaScript function returns a Boolean (as opposed to a null, undefined, or object. He also shared a way to force an undefined to return a null. Here’s the code snippets:

something ? true : false


!!something


return something || null;

Ah! That’s refreshing! Brings me back to my old C++ days…

Rebooting My Site

- 2 min read - 278 words
Dan Gilleland
Dan Gilleland
Owner of Gilleland.ca

This reboot (Dec 27-28, 2016) is less about content and more about rendering GitHub pages in a clean GitHub repository of posts.

By clean, I mean that the repository has a small-footprint of files for actually rendering the page and is focused on keeping the posts (in MarkDown format) up-front. Why do I want this? Well, it’s basically because other solutions (i.e. - Jekyll) seem to flood the repository with all sorts of templates, parsable items, yaml files, etc.

Instead, I want to just have the following core files:

index.html
A small, clean html file that "frames" out the web page.
index.js
A small, clean javascript file that leverages CDN libraries to load (using Fetch) and parse MarkDown files as HTML.
index.css
A small, clean CSS file that uses modern layout tools like the modern FlexBox CSS and the upcoming Grid (which is "upcoming" in that most browsers don't support it yet).
nav.md
The article list as a MarkDown file that creates a simple list of links to the pages.
ReadMe.md
A ReadMe.md file that most repositories have that doubles as the "home page" content of the web page.
.nojekyll
Required to prevent GitHub from default-rendering the site as a Jekyll website (which prevents getting the MarkDown files via Fetch).
404.html
To re-direct the user to the home page

I’m using Vue and Vue-Router to help accomplish these tasks. It’s important to me that the site makes it friendly for the visitor to bookmark articles (#DontFearTheHashBang). Also, since there is no other “dynamic” aspects than having more posts to share, I would like it to work as a SPA (Single-Page-App).