Tag: #META

I've done a bit of work on the site over the long weekend. Got around to a basic theme instead of plain text styles. It support both light and dark styles. It's still simple, but improves the readability. The front-end now supports markdown. Markdown has been on my list of things to-do for awhile. It make formatting easy, and also takes care of links, code blocks and an common way to do image embeds.

Along with markdown I have built out an actual back-end with a post editor. The back-end is also nextjs but it runs locally and talks to the laravel api that also runs locally. The front-end is nextjs but statically exported and pulls posts and pages from the api when building. Another item is media uploads (and embeds thanks to markdown). It gets uploaded to the api from the back-end and then the front-end copies them at build time.

I wanted a way to do comments without switching from a static site. There are a few ways to do that using javascript and 3rd party services, but I had the idea to use Mastodon instead. The way it works is if comments are enabled for a post, at build time it will trigger my @blog bot to share a post. From there I can either boost or quote it to share it with the people that follow @bhhaskin. People can then comment/reply to the post and the next time I build the site it will be pulled down by the api. It does mean there is a lag between commenting on the Mastodon post and when they show up on the blog post, but it is a good trade off.

I've spend a lot of time the last two weeks doing some major updates to the infrastructure and backend of this site. The site is no longer hosted using virualmin, but running in docker. It required me to spin up a few supporting services like Coredns and a registry. I am working on setting up some custom container orchestration. My goal is to phase out all my virualmin instances and migrate everything to docker with a custom management panel.

I've added new tag listing pages along with single post pages. I have also decided to keep things staticly generated for right now.

2022 was an interesting year, but like most people I am glad it's over. I did a lot of driving, more than usual. I stayed on my boat a bit which was great. Got into a car accident (that wasn't fun), and also had my fuel tank drilled out and gas stolen. Not a great year for my car. Got some boat projects done. Watched a lot of great sunsets.

I have a few goals for 2023 that I will be writing about in more detail in the coming months. Some of the highlights are better organization in both work and life, weight loss, switching to Linux on my desktop. In the short term I need to find an apartment, and waiting on a new fuel tank.

I said I was going to blog more, then I didn't. But I've finally found a little bit of time to do some work on this site. I added published dates, tags, and split the minimal styles into SCSS modules. Next I am going to make everything database driven and split posts out into their own pages. I will need to spin up a REST API for the Next.js front-end to consume. The REST API will come from Laravel. I need to figure out how to host a Node App on my existing infrastructure. Right now everything is statically deployed.

That is kinda it for now.

I'm back! I've decided to give blogging another go. As such I am going to be making a new personal web site. The new site is going to use NextJS for the frontend and Laravel for the backend. I am using NextJS at work and it seems like a good fit. I am still deciding on what aesthetic the site will be using. Right now I am leaning towards doing something fun and base it off a Fantasy User Interface. FUIs are the often flashy user interfaces you see in movies and TV shows. To start with though this post is going to be markdown file, and I am going to build from there. I've already created an archive of the old posts. I plan on importing them to the new site once things are a little more put together.