Changes

Posted in 2022-07-02

After my usual short absence from posting here, I decided to blogpost again. Things have been changing for some time now, and I want to share with you some of the changes I have been working on.

First, you might have already noticed that the website's appearance has been changed. For a few months, I have been experimenting with the CSS stylesheet of the website in order to make it look a bit nicer, but also keeping it as simple as possible. Not too long ago, I decided to look if there is an archived version of my website, which used my older design. To my surprise, there were a few archives with some stuff I have removed from the website back then. Looking at that brought a smile on my face, reminding me how nice it was to experiment with CSS 2 years ago. So, I decided to challenge myself by recreating it in a way that would work with my current website's layout, and it worked pretty well with minimal changes.

Also, I decided to work on a background. In fact, the grey background I used was supposed to be a placeholder, until I find a good alternative, which I haven't found until now. For my current background, I decided to get an image from my collection and do some editing on GIMP, mostly dithering and messing with a few effects. I have changed the colors around the website, like the link colors for example, to match the whole theme of the website as well.

Another change I've done recently was to rewrite my website in org-mode. I've been using Emacs for the last few months as my editor of choice, and I'm quite satisfied with it. One of its features is org-mode, a very powerful markup language which can generate text in various formats, including HTML. For a few months, I used sblg to generate my last two posts. But that seemed pointless to me when I can write my posts in a more convenient way, since I switched to Emacs. I didn't have many issues switching some of my pages from handwritten HTML to org-mode, but I had to change some stuff in some places. It can be quite time consuming.

You may have noticed that I have been switching servers for some time. After an issue I had with my server's hardware back in March, I have been switching to VMs provided by friends in order to host some of my stuff there. I know that selfhosting would be the best solution, but unfortunately, I can't do that because of various issues, like having a slow internet connection and not having any hardware to use as my server, except from my laptop, which I used to host mirrors of my website in Tor and I2P. Currently, I'm using a FreeBSD jail. Being used to servers running Linux, it's slightly more challenging to set up services, but I'll eventually get used to how that works.

By the way, talking about BSDs, I recently switched the Mac OS installation on my laptop to GhostBSD, a distro based on FreeBSD. It's a distribution that makes FreeBSD more easy to set up for users who aren't quite familiar with how BSD systems work. I had to deal with a couple of installations of FreeBSD that didn't work for various reasons, as well as the hell of setting up UEFI. But now I can boot to GhostBSD, I'm enjoying it and I'm writing this post from this system. I'll probably write more about it in its own post, similar to the one I wrote about Void Linux.

Something I have been thinking about, is that the only thing I've been posting about on my website is stuff about technology. While I really like writing about it, I think it's boring to write about a specific subject all the time. Originally, I wanted to write about more stuff, like anime and music I have enjoyed, but haven't really done so. I don't consider myself good at writing, especially in English, as it isn't my native language. Also, I'm not really good at writing articles, and I don't like to post short pieces of text here. I think it's better to work more on that in the future.

I tried to keep the post somewhat short, although I know it really isn't. If you have any questions about anything, you're welcome to ask me. That's all I have to say for now. I'll be back with more stuff soon.

Created by getimiskon.