Let’s be honest, I don’t really write that much, and I probably won’t “finally start writing more,” but I do like to tinker with my site and try new things. So here we are, another rebuild, this time with Astro.

It gave me the opportunity to learn a few new things, try some new ideas, and ultimately I like my site even better now—and boy is it blazing fast even though the script bundle is larger than before!

It’s been about a year since I redesigned my website using eleventy. I mostly liked the redesign, but had some reservations—both about eleventy, and some style nuances.

After long consideration, I decided to switch to hugo. Why?

For half a year now I’d been considering building this as a static site. For years, I’ve mainly used WordPress, though I’ve toyed around with other methods several times over the years. I’m sure I’ll change it all again someday…

The thing is, while a web-based admin & writing interface seems desirable in theory, I found myself avoiding it. I basically live in my code editor anyway, why not make it the place I also write for my website?

My partner occasionally hosts some karaoke, and lately has been using software from OpenKJ, which is pretty nifty. The creator of that project released, some time back, a request service you can pay to use—it lets you upload your song library from the main software, and then lets people search and request songs while you’re hosting.

They also released a little standalone version of this that you can host yourself, which is right up my alley, so I’ve done that. However, it hasn’t been updated since 2018, and while the API hasn’t changed, the interface is a little wonky and not great on mobile. So for a while, I’ve been meaning to fork it and improve it…

I’ve created an online Tripeaks Solver.

Ages ago, in the era of blogs, I used WordPress for a few years, but at the time I was too convinced that programming was too hard for me to properly learn enough web development to really customize things, and eventually I stopped writing as other interests drew my attention.

Here’s the boring story of how I ended up all the way back at WordPress after learning enough programming that nothing really scares me anymore…

While re-implementing my website in elixir/phoenix, I wanted to include an RSS feed for the blog posts. Luckily I found pretty much everything I needed in Daniel Wachtel’s Building an RSS Feed with Phoenix post, but since I’m making use of LiveView, I ran into one hiccup—errors about a missing root.xml layout!

After a few months working with Writefreely, (kept separate from a static webpack-generated front page), I just really didn’t like the feel of keeping a blog in separate software with a database, when the content itself was just markdown. Probably the thing to do would be to hop on the static site bandwagon, but I’ve been spending so much time learning elixir & phoenix for other projects, I didn’t relish spending time learning a whole new toolchain.

Luckily, there are good resources on basing a blog off markdown files in Elixir Phoenix, in a manner basically as speedy as a static site. So…

July 2021 update: Well that didn’t last long. Turns out I really miss having a convenient interface to write posts. But I’ve learned enough to implement my site design as a WordPress theme, and I’m tired of using tiny low-to-no-support projects, so WordPress it is!

April 2021 update: After a few months, I decided I wanted my blog integrated, and I wanted to do it with Elixir, so I’m no longer using the static webpack-built website, but the style is basically the same. So anyway, the below is outdated but it was fun learning.