Decade of technology updates

Recap of the last decade

It really hasn’t been ten years since I last updated this site. The now page gets updated a few times a year. But it might as well be ten years since the last proper update. Both content wise and technology wise.

Last time I wrote about this, I talked about in the HTTP/2, SSL & Hugo post. Which already is a bit of a hint of what was exciting and new, and what were the big changes back in 2016. Updating my server to support HTTP/2, moving from Jekyll to Hugo, and all the trouble involved.

The post ends with a what’s next section, which is always good to review a decade later.

More blog posts? There were six of them, not exactly what you’d call a frequent poster. Social network sharing buttons? Nope. And that’s a good thing. Static asset pipeline improvements? Not really, and with the number of posts and updates it wasn’t needed. Deployment? Well actually yes, and we’ll talk about that in another post in detail.

I’ll give myself a 1.5 out of 4 for achieving those goals over the course of the last ten years.

But what is new then?

There’s upgrades across the board (someone has been a bit more productive and excited about personal projects, ever since switching to working 80% part time):

• New server for my personal projects (including this site). Running on Ubuntu LTS, and just for the sake of trying new things out, running Caddy as the web server. I’m liking it a lot. At least for my needs it is much easier and quicker to configure and maintain than the previous nginx.
• The change in the infrastructure also means that the site now supports HTTP/3, so the site is even faster. Not that that is a common issue with sites built using a static site generators. But it is nice to see sub 100ms page loads.
• Hugo is still very much part of this, and I’m glad I stuck with it, especially after all my struggles with it when I initially tried to update it and the old theme. Like I mentioned on Bluesky it’s easier to start from scratch if you have technical debt of a decade.
• Theme-wise I’m using the lovely hugo-bearblog theme. Which in turn is based on Bear Blog.
• The new theme, design, and way of structuring content allows me for more flexibility when it comes to content as well. Now I can have pages! Like the now and contact pages. Have you heard of pages on websites yet?
• Automated deployments via GitHub Actions, allow me to create content from any device anywhere in the world, and it’ll be automatically published here.

What comes next?

Here we go again, making promises. Will the score be better than 1.5 out 4? Time will tell. But I’d like to think so. Either way, here’s a short list of things that I’d like to see on this site.

• More blog posts with a personal take on things. It’s what I’ve built the site for. Still technology, gaming, science fiction, book, podcast related. But more personal this time.
• A way for people to interact with the site and an easy way for people to let me know that they’ve read or enjoyed the content. Just a simple button at the end of the page that says “I’ve read this”?
• Focus on Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and in general all things nice, clutter free, and how the internet should be like and not the slop monster it has become.
• Analytics? Currently there’s no analytics, and there certainly won’t be any kind of analytics from the likes of Google. But it would be of interest to me to at least see what content is being looked at, and from where maybe? We’ll see. There are at least plenty of really good self-hosted options for analytics these days.

Having just re-read and edited the list, it would be in fact amazing to see all of those things happen on other sites too!