I’m starting to do actual reseach for my next article, which, i lied, it’s actually going to be about Geminispace.
It seems like everyone stopped talking about it after its boom a couple years ago, but it seems to be thriving in its own sense, with activity
every day on places like Antenna and the Geminispace BBS.
I made a random post asking people for cool sites that show what you can do under the limitations of the Gemini protocol, and I got a bunch of responses.
I even got a pretty detailed list with categories from someone who wished not to be documented on the web.
Still, that doesn’t mean that everything is sunshine and rainbows. Two days in and I already found someone promoting
alt-right anti-Palestine behavior on Station, another bulletin board like platform for Gemini. It sucks that sort of stuff has popped up here, but
one has to remember that even if this is the “smallnet”, this is still the internet. There will still be assholes.
I have a problem: if I want to update my site, I have to shut both it and my Forgejo instance down in order to have enough dedodated wham
headroom to actually run pnpm build without making it crash under error code 137. Whoops. I traded one problem (having to do a compile process
every time I want to change my website) for a worse one (the same thing but i also have to explicitly shut down both it and something unrelated
in order for it to run without crashing).
I could, of course, just throw more money at the problem by upgrading my VPS.
I have $50 in my bank account. That’s not an option.
Another way to fix this problem is to move to something like Astro that’s specifically designed for my use case. I had some trouble wrapping my head
around Astro last time I tried it out, but it may be something I have to do in the future. I’m putting a pin on it for now, but I’m not going to
hop over just yet. The future stuff I want to do (such as auth & comments systems) will likely be easier on Next than on Astro since Next is the
McDonald’s of React-based metaframeworks right now.
This journal update is an attempt at seeing if I can make use of the secret third option: only compiling the contentlayer MDX files unless there’s
something I want to change outside of that. If that’s an option I can utilize, then I can probably just make a git action to automatically
recompile the MDX whenever I push a commit containing an MDX file. That’ll do for now.
UPDATE: NO. NO IT DOESN’T. THE SITE DOESN’T UPDATE THE PAGES WHEN I JUST COMPILE CONTENTLAYER. I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING EVERY TIME. IM SCREAMING
I decided to make it its own MDX file stuffed in its own special folder and grabbed by its own special TSX page… because I want to be able to use
MDX to write this stuff. I don’t wanna have to put <p>’s everywhere lol.
I’ve thought about implementing a table of contents so you can jump to the day you want to see, but I’m deciding against that for now. One day I’ll
update the TOC to be collapsible, and once I do, I’ll add it to this page, automatically collapsed (unless you unfurl it, in which case that state
will be saved via cookie for later).
I also finally gave some much-needed love to my Hello Again article.
I was not very satisfied with how it got published. I rushed so fast to get my site ready and out the door that I forgot to properly proofread
my article. So, I’m doing that now. Hopefully these changes will make the article flow better and easier to parse.
Finally, I think it would be a good idea to post the old entries of this journal on here. I don’t have them on me right now,
but once I figured out where I put them, I’ll throw them on here for archival purposes.
This section contains older journal entries ported over from the previous version of this site.
August 20, 2023
My CalcKey instance has been perpetually upset at me. It sucks because if I undo my migration, I’ll likely lose all of my follows and followers. I think I might need to upgrade my VPS so it isn’t using up all my server’s resources… but I’m not sure if I can afford it right now. If you have some suggestions as to how I can fix this, email me lol
Also, sorry for fucking up the sharefeed and not realizing until more than a month later. whoops.
July 5, 2023
I’ve been meaning to create an online forums for a while now to serve as my blog’s comment section and provide an alternative social space for queer nerds like me. I thought I found the perfect solution in Discourse… but it eats up so much ram. Only around 70MB is left of my VPS’s 2GB of ram. Ouch.
Thus, even though you may have noticed that I had Discourse serve as the comments section of my site for about a month, I am disabling it for now to make room for a Calckey instance. Sorry about that!
As an apology, more sharefeed stuffs coming your way! :3
Tried to wrangle IndieWeb stuff like h-entries and h-cards. I want to murder IndieWeb now.
In better news, I decided to roll my own social links in the footer instead of the side bar, and I think it works well!
Gonna throw out some more sharefeed posts in a bit. yay.
June 2, 2023
I found out something funny about the new Etrian Odyssey HD remasters.
The digital release of all three games is priced at $80. There is no physical release of the game except in Asian markets.
However, PlayAsia is selling said physical release (for the Nintendo Switch) at $70. With standard shipping to the US, the total price is $77.90… cheaper than the digital release.
Guess me being a weirdo who likes collecting physical Switch games wasn’t dumb after all.
Also, I have a bunch of shit lined up for the sharefeed. Going to be spreading them out over the weekend. Happy reading!
June 1, 2023
First of all, happy pride month. Be gay. Do crime.
Second, you may notice my blog is now Evil PewDiePie flavored. Figured it would be a cool way to spice up the visual design. If there are any elements that still look messed up with this change, let me know.
Finally, link emebeds now work. I may pretty up the embed image at some point for articles, but for now, I’m pretty excited!
May 19, 2023
I follow a Hacker News bot on Telegram. Whenever I see something interesting, I forward the post to my “Saved Messages” to read later… which I never do.
I had an idea to turn this pipeline into something that is actually useful for not just me but for anyone else who is as much of a fucking nerd as I am. Basically, it would be a webpage filled with links to blog posts or articles or other websites that I find interesting (note: interesting != good) that can also be viewed as an Atom feed. I would attach summaries/notes to each link (which would be stuffed under the <summary> tag on the Atom feed) so I can give some more detials of what I think about it and possibly what I might do with it in the future (e. make a response to it on my blog, use the project for my own purposes, etc).
I’m sure there’s already solutions for “read later” feeds like what I wanna do, but I wanna roll my own because I think it would be pretty simple to make a basic rendition of this (especially in Jekyll thanks to Liquid markup allowing you to literally roll your own custom Atom feed if you wanna). Plus… if this kicks off, maybe I can develop it further! Comments, a framework to make something like it for your own site… maybe even ActivityPub support.
I just updated the theme of this blog from Minima to Chirpy. Find this a lot better than I had before! Gonna make a blog post on it once I finalize some shit.
I also need to fix up this journal to actually work as an HTML journal. Right now, there’s some elements missing, and I need to make a jekyll plugin to parse through this page’s content and put in the proper elements for each entry. Might do that as a warm up to jekyll-to-gemini .
oh also pro tip that i just learned: adding two or more spaces to a line and then inserting a newline lets you insert a line break. donno why it doesn’t just format it the right way in the first place but I didn’t make Markdown.
March 28, 2023
Gonna try to use this as a space to put stuff that doesn’t feel “big enough” for a blog post. Hopefully this encourages me to actually use this site more lol
The writing contained within this site may contain the author's personal opinions. These opinions do not represent any of the author's employers or other organizations the author is a part of — past, present, or future.