Sand in the bearings

there's like 3 steps to update my site. it takes me 5 minutes to write a paragraph, but 10 minutes to upload it to my site

That little snippet appeared last night in the notes from the Homebrew Web Club meeting in Portland, and it sang out to me. My site is the same, and at least part of that is my own fault. Everything happens first on a local copy of the website. Then I upload changes to github. Github sends the changes to the live site. And then, with luck, they appear on the live site.

It's set up this way because at the start, when I was working with a new CMS, almost everything I did broke something and I didn't want that mess exposed in public. Now, though, aside from one or two larger itches I need to scratch, I'm more or less done with tinkering. I'm still nervous about dealing direct with the live site. I could, easily enough. I could even just create things entirely by hand, avoiding the CMS post creation entirely and leaving it to github to do the needful, but I don't.

One reason, I think, is that I don't have a deep enough understanding of github. Although I treat my local copy as the canonical version, I know it isn't, really. That's the version on github. The live site is as much a copy as my local site. I worry now that if I make changes directly to the live site (as opposed to making changes in github) The two copies will get completely out of step, and I have no idea how to reverse the magic that allows github to push changes to the live site.

All that, however, is no excuse for not continuing the tedious job of bringing in old posts from previous incarnations, except that maybe I am avoiding that because I deep down I am thinking about changing back to a platform more suited to writing.