At last Sunday's Tinderbox meetup, I mentioned how much I've been enjoying working in Tinderbox, and beginning to exploit some of its features since I've been attending all the meetups.

A couple of years ago, I had a zoom session with Michael Becker who's quite expert with Tinderbox. He's also a 400Hz kind of guy, while I run at 60Hz. He tried to show me how to automate certain aspects of the marmot and I could only follow about a third of what he was saying. I tried to implement some of his suggestions and failed at it, so I just went back to doing it the way I knew how to do it, which was mostly manually.

But in preparing for that zoom session, I decided to re-factor how the marmot was structured. Basically, every month's archive was a single file at the top level of the domain, and there was one Images folder divided into years for all the images. It was getting a bit cluttered, though it probably could have kept working that way well into the indefinite future. Nevertheless, I decided to structure things a little "better," and in the process kind of messed up a lot of the old image links.

Stuff happens. You live with it.

Today being the 1st of August, I had to add a new August 2023 container, which I did the same way I've always done it — manually.

Now I'm relatively confident that I can automate that function, so that's a little project for this morning. I'll do a "proof of concept" in a test Tinderbox file, make sure I understand what's happening. Then I'll duplicate the marmot and try to implement the change on the duplicate. If that works as intended, I'll make the change in the original and delete the duplicate.

I've learned that it's best to work on a test file before you try something new with a big file that works reliably. And then work with a duplicate of the actual production version to verify it works, before you start messing with the version you rely on.

I'll report back on my success or failure later today or tomorrow.