freeform goodness

May 31, 2024

So there’s kind of a lot to do

Among other things:

  • I still haven’t decided if I’m going to try to do anything with the old archives.
  • I have to decide whether to stick with this template, and if I do, how much effort I want to put into customizing it.
    • With the old blog, half of the fun was coding up little applet-izers and nonsense for the sidebars. I don’t yet know what that sort of thing really entails when I’m working with a statically generated site.
    • I really don’t understand this blog engine yet. PyBlosxom (and Blosxom before it) were really, really simple things to deal with conceptually. Drop HTML in a folder structure, crop some photos, and forget.
  • The machine I’m running this on is comically underpowered, like 2010-cellphone-level underpowered. Of course, that may actually be good enough for serving static webpages to a tiny handful of browsers a day.
  • Probably won’t bother with comments. I don’t see very many still active bloggers who bother with them and all the annoyances that come with them. If there’s a way to link them to some other discussion platform, maybe. I don’t really like Disqus and the like.
  • There aren’t feeds yet, because I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing and I don’t want to keep messing with people’s feed readers while I’m still working out what permalinks will look like, whether or not I can support Etags, etc.

May 30, 2024

Is this thing on?

a tumbleweed, blowing down the aisles of a server room

So meet the new blog, same as the old blog.

Uh, not really.

So for about the last half dozen years or so, my blog had been running on PyBlosxom, and hosted on a really cheap web hosting platform not to be named.

Long story short, one day the web host, well, disappeared, and PyBlosxom has never been updated to support Python 3. Running an unmaintained blogging platform written in an EOL programming language on a no-longer-extant hosting provider is no way to live, son.

So for now, think of this as a placeholder. It’s a bunch of static pages hosted on a Raspberry Pi, hanging off of a cable modem, to give an idea of my level of commitment here.

As of right now, that means none of the old content (which would need to be cadged together from out-of-date backups. the Internet Archive, and faulty memories), a default template, ugly fonts, and none of the fun sidebar crap I used to have fun with.

Hey, at least the main page doesn’t 404 anymore.