Some blog lore and a little fun script - Blaugust the first

02 Aug, 2025

The Meta-Sigil Has Been Etched: A Declaration of Intent

It was only this morning, with caffeine not yet metabolized, that I stumbled across Blaugust—a ritualistic posting challenge whispered about in the digital alleys by JCProbably in their opening invocation¹. A gauntlet cast not by editors or algorithms but by fellow wanderers of the indie web.

Premise: Post thirty-one times during this calendar-mapped descent into madness. It's not about daily work but the gravity of quantity— momentum magicl, if you will. A Discord cabal even exists, pulsing with links, encouragement, and light chaos².

Now, as for me—rituals have always held power, but it takes me ages to entomb them as habit. Still, I've found solace in the chorus of Bear-bloggers and Mastodons, that sprawling constellation of weird, passionate souls who still post not for brand or currency but for sheer curiosity. For communion.

So I begin this Blaugust not with a scream into the void but a small conjuring of code and some personal myth.

Behold, the First Conjuration

Some time ago—in a week of breakage, repair, and the usual gnawing at the walls of CSS—I posted about making my blog title dance to my whim. The log is here. But, like so many draft rituals, I never actually explained it.

Let that shame now be exorcised.

A Silly Trick, But It Sparks Joy

My old LiveJournal bore the Joycean moniker Portrait as the Man as an Artist—a reverent nod to literary chaos incarnate³. It clung to me like a ghost. But when I transitioned to the spartan elegance of Bear, “artist” felt like a term I’d outgrown. Still, I didn't want to sever the lineage entirely.

So I compromised: I’d make the title mutable. A trick of the eye. A sleight of script.

It only requires three artifacts:

1. A visible element in the HTML to act as the would-be usurper title
2. The canonical title—an <H1>—lurking stoically on the page
3. A scrap of JavaScript to swap their souls

Atop the post templates I employ:

<div class="dynamic-title">Portrait of a TKK</div>

Sometimes I omit it. Sometimes I swap in another cryptic abbreviation or nonsense glyph—“blauguster” in this case, because naming things is a small act of magic⁴.

The script to do the swap is dead simple (I realize in retrospect)

  document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {
    const dynamicTitle = document.querySelector(".dynamic-title");
    const h1 = document.querySelector("header a.title h1");

    if (dynamicTitle && h1) {
      const newTitle = dynamicTitle.textContent.trim();
      if (newTitle.length > 0) {
        h1.textContent = newTitle;
      }
    }
  });

What that code does in plain english:

When the page loads, grab the text inside the element with the "dynamic-title" ID. 
Stick it in the variable "dynamicTitle". 
Do the same for the H1 but stick it in the variable "H1".

If both variables are set, double check that there's actual text in the dynamic title. 
If there is text there,  switch the H1 with the text in dynamicTitle.

And that's it. After the browser loads, the magic executes and, without even a whisper, the title changes⁵.

So

Fairest All Reading Eye, this starts the challenge and I look forward to scrying your own chaos.

Footnotes

#HTML #blaugust #javascript #me