git on jwogrady

A rebase keeps every byte and not one commit

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:02:54 -0500

A repository had seventeen branches on the server and zero tags. Thirteen tags existed on a laptop and on two older repositories that were due to be retired. Pushing them up was housekeeping — the kind of thing you do because it is free, not because you expect it to matter.

The tags mark catalog snapshots, one per export of a plumbing company’s price book, going back to the earliest known copy at eighty-seven services. Nice to keep. Not urgent.

I read one branch of six and called the salvage complete

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:57:28 -0500

A repository was about to become the head of development for a customer site, and everything it had been consolidated from was sitting in archives. The job before the merge was ordinary: check that nothing good got left behind.

I did the careful version. Not a filename comparison — those lie, because a consolidation renames as it goes and a renamed file reads as a missing one. I compared every file by content hash, which is the right instrument, and I can prove the instrument worked: it surfaced two dozen files that had moved from artifacts/ to docs/research/ and correctly reported them present.

Four releases for the person before the business had one

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:45:00 -0500

If you have ever gone back to something you wrote a few weeks ago about your own plan, and found it describing a plan you no longer have —

yes. That one. Let’s talk about that.

What I would have told you yesterday

I have two Hugo themes. A theme, if you haven’t met one, is the design layer: it decides what a page looks like and leaves the writing alone.

I installed the theme and the theme did not appear

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:42:00 -0500

$ git submodule add https://github.com/jwogrady/hugo-spectrum themes/hugo-spectrum

Submodule rather than Hugo Modules, because Modules wants a go.mod and this theme doesn’t ship one. The submodule pins a commit, which means a checkout a year from now builds the same site as today. I like that property a lot.

Then I rebuilt and got my own handmade templates back.

The scaffold baseof.html and page.html I’d written an hour earlier were still sitting in layouts/, and a project file at the same path beats the theme’s entirely. Not merged, not layered — replaced. Five files were quietly overriding a theme I’d just installed, and the build was perfectly happy about it.