August 21, 2021

Satisfying covid-19: day 526 | US: GA | info | act

I spent a couple of days posting the poem and commentary for Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and I have to say it’s a satisfying way to spend some time. Not only does it let me review a poem I’ve not read in a while (OK, I reread it last weekend), but do some additional reading and commentary on it. This is fun for me, and potentially good for my students. Granted, it might take a bit of patience to read through the commentary, but I like the format I’ve come up with for poetry—a poetry template if you will. Rime might be the longest poem I’ve posted so far, and the coolest part of this is that I can do as much (or as little) as I want. Maybe the next time I teach the poem, I can find another source to add to my analysis.

I’m still not entirely pleased with having the date as the title of the page, but I like the date on the page. I guess this is why MediaWiki is not a blogging platform. Still, the way around this is to make a hard redirect on a page named for the poem—only really relevant when using search since page title matches appear first in the results. I’m actually thinking about changing the title’s font, size, and color on the default page to not be so prominent; this is customizable on individual pages, too, like I did above. At least MediaWiki is forever tweakable, so I made a template, {{Journal-Top}}, that will change the display of the date and add a title, if so desired.

Man, I love MediaWiki.