Re: Hello yet again, cruel world!

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken.

Here we are again.

This site is once again under re-construction live, without a safety net. I’ve decided to up sticks and move inside WordPress itself. For the first time our show is broadcasting from wordpress.com HQ, itself. Exciting stuff. In this phase, we are lazy-webbing it.

As you can see, we’re once again starting from almost scratch. The site continues to to incorporate a sand mandala approach when migrations occur. You can find older content more or less stored at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. My archive is just web. I’ll at some point re-write another manifesto extolling the values of an ephemeral online presence on an internet that often refuses to forget.

The current design theme is a holding pattern, but I like it. It’s a theme called Cyanotype, which has a sort of government report feel to it with the right colour scheme. It’s as if it’s some kind of official form. I wanted something more text-based, minimalist and not requiring feature images for everything. For the first time in a while I’ve decided to ditch self-managed hosting for the ol’e site and let someone else worry about all of that. In the end, I didn’t need my day job following me home any more.

Last year, I got around to getting four posts on the site, but spent a lot more effort just futzing around with it. Playing with more ridged security header policies, running an Onion address mirror, experimenting with ActivityPub integration, git workflows, hardening the server on Linode and toying with various Cloudflare settings. Like all mad scientists I prefer to experiment on myself.

But for 2024 I’m going to make an effort to actually write more. Optimism. To that end, I wanted to find a solution that made content creation easier and potentially even more fun. Something that could potentially communicate with ActivityPub, is open source, and be able to easily publish from an Android phone. CMS doesn’t exist. I want it easy like how posting to Twitter was easy back when I did that before Elon caught it on fire. So, like Mastodon, or Bluesky even. There should be a text box, some some media options, and a publish button. No blogging platforms yet meet the UX goldilocks zone.

As per the domain, the topics and overall theme of the blog will remain roughly the same: Beware of the promises new technology brings: it tends to keep them.