So I did fall off on maintaining my site. However a lot has happened since I was able to put some time and effort into this site. I moved country, to be closer to my partner’s family. I also rejoined my previous job at the same time. We are also in the midst of house hunting. And the velocity of work has been a lot higher than I think anyone expected.

Oh, and we got a cat.

But, I have been plugging away at the site in the past week or so, and, as you can see, rebuilt the theme. I wanted to incorporate what I saw and liked from other blogs. Trying to keep this site simple, readable, but still my own space. I still have some dangling items to figure out. I ended up staying with Hugo, rather than moving to 11ty, or ghost. So I still have a high friction on writing and posting to the site I need to work out. However, I do think the site is in a much better place.

I have broken out posts into: posts for long form, focused topics. Notes, which are just quick updates or scattered thoughts. And Links, which will primarily be me finding something interesting I want to share, maybe a quote and a thought. I am hoping the latter two take off some pressure on what to write about.

I have also improved the blogroll, and made a proper shelf for right now blogs, books, and podcasts. I might expand it more to movies or other things.

The next big item I added, support for webmentions! Maybe I will get one someday.

The last big thing is I have also set up a [[digital garden]]. This is something like a centralized area of information. That way as topics come up I don’t feel as obligated to redefined them and I can keep the definition updated wherever they are mentioned.

Now, one thing to be clear about with this overhaul, I did use [[AI]] to help. This is an irksome topic in a lot of places, and I plan to make a deeper post about the reasoning there.

Anyway, that’s what I got for now.

The proposal is simple, instead of assuming that you must stay up-to-date on every breaking story or event you should try to schedule it. Often times, it proposes, when you are following breaking events you feel more informed, but never have the full picture until later. At that point, most would find themselves better informed by waiting for the story to go from “developing” to “developed.”

Taking this within my own processes for news, primarily RSS, I realized that maybe I should consider adjusting this. I’ve often struggled with getting feeds from various news sites and seeing a deluge of information coming in. I’ve scoffed at the idea of Newsletters because I “felt” I would be less informed by relying on a delayed and smaller set of articles. However, I realize that maybe there are places where this makes sense, e.g. with major news sites.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and migrate some of my feeds to newsletters. Hopefully it means I will spend less time sifting through my feed inbox and more time quickly adding interesting items to my later pile to then review at a personally scheduled point in time.

This is still a work in progress, but maybe this can help me continue to claw back time from the attention economy.

Also, I finally updated the favicon! It’s nothing special, but at least it matches the default theme.

I finally got the theme, congo, updated and in sync again between my fork and upstream. There was a bug for a bit where the theme wouldn’t compile with Hugo because of some underlying skeleton changes with how Hugo worked. So I had that pinned to an older version to continue to generate the site. Now that is all updated, and I feel a bit better about things again.

I also removed the feature images on my blog posts, because I don’t feel that I need them. I want to focus on writing and that has been a bit of a blocker. If you noticed, the most recent posts didn’t have any. This will keep everything a bit more consistent too.

As for actual posts beyond site updates, I do have a few things I want to write a bit about. I’ve been playing with TRMNL as a BYOD — once that is finished it will be a decent sized post. I’ve also been playing with Godot again, and I’d like to write up things about that. Obviously there are also topics that I continue to find interesting, like security and AI. Really, there is a lot, I just need to be more disciplined.