2022 August
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Via Kev Quirk: this great article by Florens Verschelde about SSGs (Aside: I already shared this via the links page, but I had more to say, so now there's a blog post about it too.) I agree with a lot of things mentioned in this article, but what really hit home for me was the complaint about limitations in how content hierarchies and partial content are handled in SSGs. "...But the nail in the coffin was always that it’s either impossible or way too hard to build a single page from several pieces of content." This relates to something that
2022 June
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I finally updated my long-unmaintained blogroll page. The contents of this page are only one category in my feedreader. Typically when I find a new blog that seems interesting to follow, I first put in a category called "tentative". After some time of following, I'll decide whether I want it to be in my public blogroll. Reviewing the public blogroll also means removing blogs that are no longer current or updated. I will typically move those into a feedreader category called "defunct". I'll highlight new/added blogs in a future "Follow Friday" post (a series which I have neglected to follow-up
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
2020 July
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So recently Github secretly rolled out a new feature where you can create a file named README.md in a repo named github.com/<your github username>/<your github username>, and that markdown file would be rendered on your Github profile page. It means, you can now put basically anything you want on your Github profile! I just read this post from Simon Willson about using this new feature + Github actions and a Python script to automatically generate and update his Github profile. That seemed neat so I thought about how I would do it. My blog is already setup to publish using -
In several places on this site (like if you click Photos in the menu up top), I have a grid-like view of a list of photos/images: I used to just have each thumbnail open the post permalink on click, with the anchor set to the image itself. The image would be shown in full size inline of the post. This was a bit clunky and not so modern, so I decided to implement it so that the image lists instead will show a Lightbox-style overlay with the full image and some details and an option to click through to the
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
2019 December
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A few days ago, a friend from a company I used to work for said to me something along the lines of "{Company Executive} asked me how you are doing", and I couldn't give anything other than a pithy "I'm alive" answer. I find that since I generally live an unconventional life, it's a pain to describe how I'm doing. It's not a straightforward "Oh, you know, still working as a freelance developer/consultant/solutions architect" for me, because I don't really identify that much anymore with what work I'm doing or who I'm employed by. For this reason, I rarely talk
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.
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 -
I thought about making a tag "things that would only interest me" for this one lol. I've uploaded some old web archives of the oldest versions of my site - back when I still had free sites hosted on the likes of Geocities, Tripod and the lesser-known TopCities. Click here for the index! I've had these archives for a while and only now decided to put them up on the site. It's fun browsing through the older versions, basically relics of a bygone era. It was a time of hand-made HTML, CSS and JS, something that appealed to the tinkerer
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.
2019 April
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I read a recent blog post from a friend about the large page sizes on initial load of a web page. From there, I got to a link which said that the average page size nowadays is at least 3MB. This led me to check the performance of this very blog/site. Initial load of the home page clocks in with 13 requests weighing around 140KB total. This is not bad, in fact it would be a significant improvmenet since I migrated to a static site using Hugo. The homepage of the old Wordpress version of the blog comes with 44
2019 March
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A few months back, my current web host WebFaction announced they had been purchased by GoDaddy, which was worrying. Back then they hadn't announced any details other than there would be some account migrations and single sign on, so it wasn't a big deal yet. I initially joined WebFaction back in 2008 because they were a Python-friendly and developer-friendly host that had some reasonable budget options, allowing me some space to host this blog and any side projects I wanted to deploy. At that time I was learning Django, so I needed the Python support that normal hosts don't provide.
2019 January
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I always wish I had kept screenshots of what my blog looked like back during each of the myriad theme changes I've done over the years, as a kind of timeline of how my website aesthetic has evolved (or gotten worse, whatever). I recently found the stylesheets and such for my old django-powered blog from circa 2008-2009, and recently there's been this "10-year challenge" meme where people show how they've changed over the past 10 years. Tt felt like a pefect opportunity to reconstruct that old version and also capture an image of the current version for posterity's sake. I
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
2018 March
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(Image credit: r/ProgrammerHumor) I've been meaning to add SSL to this blog ever since I first heard of Let's Encrypt last year. Unfortunately, support on my otherwise awesome webhost was not yet first-class and seemed complicated at the time, so I kept putting it off. But recently I was testing something unrelated and found out that I needed to have SSL on my server in order for OAuth2 to work, so I grudgingly got to it. Luckily I found out about a handy utility written in Ruby that does most of the stuff for me: letsencrypt-webfaction. It was surprisingly easy
2016 May
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"The price for being the best is always having to be the best"
2009 January
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Django admin works! I would write more but this input method is tedious.