I finally got off my ass and did it! After all this time of being like "hmm, yknow, I should start a blog. I should create a nice blogging site for myself" and proceeding to do precisely Nothing to get there, it's finally real! There's a blog! You're reading it! Right now! Yay!
some history
It's taken me quite some time to get to this point. I initially set this domain up to have a website wayyyy back in 2019 - the Internet Archive has a capture of it from 2020 (although it's very broken for some reason). It looked very different back then though, nothing like this site. This iteration of the site starts in 2023, when I made a homepage that looked similar-ish to the current homepage. It had all the same links this one has today in the header, except none of them actually ever went anywhere. The site just kinda... sat there. Dormant. I never really did anything with it. It was forever a somewhat nice-looking homepage (at least on desktop... don't talk to me about the mobile view. shudders) with a handful of links that all said "coming soon". Which like. Yeah. Soon. Sure, mate. When exactly is "soon"?
soon is now
The blog thing has been getting to me lately. I've been having lots of ideas for blog posts, and I really want somewhere to get them all out. In particular, I have a project planned that I really want to write up on a blog and share with people, because I think a good part of that project will have some really good learning material for not just myself, but other people too. I really wanna get started on it, but my brain is all like "nooooooo you gotta blog about it. you need a blog before you do that. make a blog". Alright, fine brain. Sure. I'll make a blog.
A week or so of hitting the grindstone later, here it is! After throwing out the old site's code due to it being completely unsalvageable (protip: don't ever use Tailwind CSS for anything. That thing is a trap. You put something written using that aside for a year or so, come back to it, and it's just completely incomprehensible. Just write normal CSS. Or Sass. It's fine.), I've come up with a new, improved website that actually has stuff on it! Check out the about me page! That wasn't there before! There's also the blog now, obviously. And it all looks good on mobile too! I actually put some thought into responsive design this time, and now you can actually look at the site on your phone without it dissolving into a incoherent pile of polygons and text. The site, I mean. Not your phone. That would be scary if a site could do that to your phone. Good thing they can only do normal things to your phone, like run Javascript.
so, what's next?
Like I said, I've got a few plans for this blog. There's the aformentioned project, which involves NixOS (of course it does, we're talking about a thing I'm making here), Incus, and a handful of machines that won't be running Proxmox for much longer. I've also got a whole bunch of other things, both big and small to write about at some point, so stay tuned for that (RSS helps with that, I've heard)! Aside from the blog, though, there's a few other bits that still need working on. You might have noticed that the "projects" and "gallery" links don't really go anywhere yet. Those are still yet to be picked up. "projects" will go to a little portfolio page of some of the things I've made or worked on (mostly code), which I've still yet to write (or think super hard about what should go there, or what it should look like... bweh. Work). "gallery" will eventually go to a, well, gallery of my photography. I have a lot of photos sitting in my Darktable library, and they're dying to get out somewhere I can share them. That page is probably going to be a while before it becomes reality though. Me and one of my girlfriends are working on memorable, a little self-hosted image gallery for photography collections, and I'd like to use it to power the gallery on my site. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near ready to use at the moment (it doesn't even have a web server, the data models are still WIP), so... yeah. That one will be a little while.
But uhhhhh yeah! That's the new website babey! It's finally here, and I'm really glad I've finally got it done. I've been wanting to have a thing like this for aaaaages now, and it's so nice to finally have it. A website, all of my own, that I can write whatever I want on. Like glorpo. And pleemb. So many things! Aren't blogs wonderful?
Oh, yeah, in case you were one of the very few people who saw me post about an RSS feed on the final days of Cohost and added that to your reader... hi! There's something here now! It took a while, but it's here like I promised!