2021 March
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Over the past couple of weeks or so, I've made quite a few changes to the site, mostly focused on frontend/layout/UI changes. The changes are more or less done, so here's a changelog entry. The main driver of the changes was this post about best practices for text websites. Not all of it applies to the site, since I do have a bunch of image content around as well, but enough that I was spurred to apply many of the points and also include some additional changes I've been meaning to do. Secondary objectives include: improving site performance, accessibility, and
2020 October
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Leaving Hugo It's been a bit under two years since I migrated the site from Wordpress to Hugo. As discussed in this post one year ago, I was very happy with the general workflow of managing posts through markdown files in git, but had big problems with the Hugo build time, largely a consequence of my social media archiving. At that time, I didn't want to invest effort into migrating to a different backend, but the problem has only gotten incrementally worse since then, so I decided to take the jump and started working on it last month. Migration goals
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Server migration update: I had encountered some trouble with the Travis-CI -based Hugo build generating this here website last week. Luckily, most of the migration work to the new backend was already done, so I went ahead and switched over the servers. So this site is no longer plain-old deployed HTML, but rather powered by a Django backend. The site should be mostly the same, though I did take the opportunity to move some stuff around. There's probably some bugs floating around, and maybe some secrets even. Probably need a longer blog post writing about the migration itself, though it
2020 May
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A while back I got an export of my Foursquare/Swarm data. If you're not familiar, these were a pair of apps that were used for "checking-in" to particular locations, with a sort of gamification system where if you checked in at a place often enough, you would earn points and eventually become "Mayor" of the venue. The idea being that owners of those venues might give some benefits to those who check-in often at those locations (AFAIK, this never really caught on in the Philippines). I wasn't a super active user of Foursquare/Swarm, I had maybe 500ish check-ins from 2010-2017
2020 February
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During recent weeknotes I've mentioned that I've been working on a site redesign. The planned redesign had three objectives, more or less: Rework the navigation links so that new pages like the blogroll etc were more easily accessible. Make the homepage less messy and highlight blog posts more. The previous "stream of everything" home page mixed the blog posts in with everything else like the notes, and photos and links. General redesign to improve the layout etc. I had already done most of #1 and #2 (easy), but during the past few days, I found it difficult to decide on
2020 January
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I've been thinking for a while about doing regular weeknotes. This is a type of post I've seen in some blogs where they recap the things that've happened to them during the past week. I've actually been doing these privately for a while, and now I'm going to try making them public. I think the advantages are obvious in terms of (a) having notes to recall what you were doing over a certain time period; and (b) guaranteeing regular writing output on the blog. One disadvantage over the private weeknotes is that in private I can usually include some more
2019 November
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I mentioned before that I was looking into indieweb stuff. There's a whole wiki of information about it if you're into that sort of thing, but also here's a recent post which kind of serves as an overview. I have some comments on the content of this post, more on that later. Indieweb things I've already implemented on this site: have a personal domain (since 2006) microformats (h-card and h-feeds and h-entrys), though I would have to be using some sort of microformats reader to make sure everything there is hunky-dory (no concrete plans for this yet) webmention support, via
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FontAwesome has been fun and all, but in the interest of reducing load time and external dependencies, I removed the FA dependency on this blog and switched to SVG icons instead. Icons are from here, specifically the set by Bryn Taylor and the Special Social Icon Set #9. Not all the icons carried over, especially some of the social ones (Mastodon, etc). Workarounds had to be made. Hopefully nothing breaks!
2019 October
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I made a 3AM decision to switch over the site's front page to show what was previously under "Stream" and now the "Posts" section is listed in the menu as "Blog". We'll see if I like this better. Also, the root RSS feed now includes everything from "Stream" as well. IDK how many people were following this site via an RSS reader (I would like it if you guys told me!), but for those of you who do: surprise, you are in for a firehose! If you only want the longer-form traditional blog posts, an RSS feed for that is still available.
I also moved the fanfics from before into a new "Fiction" section. I had previously tried moving them under posts but it felt weird that the archive said I had posts from before 2002 since technically the blog hadn't existed yet. So that this section isn't made up entirely of old fanfiction, I also put up a short story I had written a couple of years ago. I probably have some more fiction hidden somewhere. If not, I'll make some!
Smaller site updates like this will probably just be under "Notes" in the future, instead of full-length blog posts. All changes can still be followed using the changelog tag.
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A post about making a guy making an archive of his twitter data made the rounds lately, so I figured I should make my own post about my ongoing efforts in this regard. I mentioned in an earlier post that I like being able to use social media to dig through my own history. But as the first link above says, these social media sites can go away since nothing lasts forever. In the spirit of the Indieweb principle to own your data, for the past few months I've been working on archiving most of my social media content on
2019 August
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm enjoying tinkering with the site layout at the moment. I give up on expecting a "stable version" of the site anytime soon and readers can expect incremental updates unannounced going forward. This site is now perpetually under renovation. Current layout image (this image is recursive): Recent changes: Someone called me out for not using a dark theme, so now here we are with a garish gray and green and orange theme, you're welcome. Generally moving around of content and UI and adding of navigation items and such Comment system revamp! I've removed Disqus, since that was a
2019 July
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As is my wont, I'm almost never satisfied with a website's layout, so I've been tinkering with this blog's layout on the backend. To make a long story short, I decided to start working on a Hugo theme. It's still largely a work in progress, as there's a bunch of things I wanted to implement. But it was good enough to replace the old one so I went ahead and deployed it, so maybe some bugs here and there on some pages. And I'm still tinkering, so probably some minor/major changes as we go along in the next few weeks.
2018 November
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Leaving Wordpress I've been using Wordpress for this blog since circa 2006 I believe, but as I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I was not 100% happy with using Wordpress for this blog. I have a few issues with Wordpress, none of them a major dealbreaker, but collectively enough to make me consider something else: the new Gutenberg editor set to become standard in 5.0 was in my experience, very clunky and kinda annoying the code structure of Wordpress is very deep and complex, sometimes making it difficult for me to make changes I want. I can usually -
What the site theme looked like before the migration from Wordpress to Hugo
(Click photos to view full-size)
2008 December
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Previously I hosted two separate WordPress blogs on roytang.net, the old one I've had since forever, and a separate one that discussed only magic related articles. It was a bit bothersome to have two WordPress installs though. Now that I've migrated to a Django backend, I decided to merge the blogs back into one. The blog now has the following sections/categories: Magic the Gathering -- for posts related to MTG Software Development -- for posts related to Software Development (hopefully I can write more about this topic) Gaming -- originally I didn't have this category, but looking at previous contents
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Well, it's a bit early. But if you're reading this then I've successfully migrated the roytang.net website to a new host. See you after the jump! Merry Christmas!
2008 July
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Changed to Thematic zroytang : yung current na wordpress theme ko parang ang crowded (Anonymous) : baka it's the font... or less ugn spacing zroytang : papagalitan mo ko pag pinalitan ko e zroytang : haha (Anonymous) : haha hindi naman a (Anonymous) : sabihin ko lang na you're fickle like a girl (Anonymous) : haha zroytang : tsk! (Anonymous) : it's nice to be female.. if magpaka-fickle ako, i've an excuse (Anonymous) : if magsungit ako, i've an excuse din (Anonymous) : if i get irrational, meron ulit excuse zroytang : and you can make sexist remarks freely! (Anonymous)
2008 May
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Someday I will find a WordPress theme that I could bear with for more than 2-4 weeks. Or I will make one.
2007 January
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The original is here. Yeah, I didn't like the header image so I removed it. I'm tired of moving themes around, so I'll settle on this for a while. Simple and clean. I'll just fuss around with the plugins later. And yeah, I'm also changing the categories around. There should be a plugin to search posts and assign multiple posts to new categories at the same time. My vacation time is almost up... I still have too many things to watch...
2006 February
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Yeah, so I was bored and went ahead and got a domain name. ^_^I'm wondering if I've wasted money, but webhosting is really cheap nowadays anyway. Thanks to the nice folks at pinoywebhosting.com for their quick service! Anyway, I hope you'll pardon me if some parts of the site aren't fully up-and-running (the about page is still the wordpress template for one), I haven't had much time to play around with wordpress yet. Farewell, Blogger. You have served me well, but it's time to try something new. Done so far: Imported posts and comments from Blogger Go through every single