We've moved!
Published on
That's right! I am here to announce that in a few months time, {previous_domain}, my home for a number of years now, will begin the slow transfer to my new domain, ste5e.site.
A few months ago, .COM and .XYZ TLDs suffered from a price increase, so naturally, I decided I'd rather move than pay more for a TLD. This isn't a commercial project, I make zero dollars from this endeavour, so in reality this is about me saving a couple dollars a year.
I would normally be fine with services increasing their prices, but this one is so dumb and weirdly targeted that I don't quite get it. Sure, COM TLDs are really the hot commodity of the internet and make up much of the internet e-commerce world, but XYZ is in the crosshairs too? That one feels just plain wrong. I don't think I know of any website where I can go and spend money, XYZ used to be a silly domain hackers liked to register because they were cheap and simple. Now we're feeling the weight of capitalism? Why?
I don't agree with it, and I am fully on board for leaving rather than sticking with it. I have always been a fan of trying to get a weirder TLD at some point, so now is my time to do so. I am settling with .SITE
for now, where I probably would have been better off trying to nab .BLOG
, but those are also not the cheapest from what I can gather.
So, as of April 2024, {previous_domain} will be fully off-line and no longer used.
If you are reading via RSS feed, in six months time the feed will be dead and you will no longer receive updates. The new feed will be hosted on ste5e.site in the coming weeks.
Now, I will discuss some other things while I'm here.
I am coming to learn the importance of establishing a proper and sound "web identity", and using websites is important to establish trust and safety between publishers and subscribers. My website here will hold a proof that I am who I am, and you can verify that comparing it to a signature hosted somewhere else, like my Mastodon. Buying a domain and hosting small content like that, as small as it is, helps establish a good trust model so nobody can "pretend" to be me for some reason.
It also helps, I think, to establish on your website something like what Linktree does by posting a small rolodex of contact chanels for users to reach out and follow you elsewhere on the internet. As such, that is one change I will attempt to solve by making something of my own that is easily shareable as well.
Perhaps by creating these avenues of trusted information I can streamline the process of updating my information entirely. Perhaps by centralizing my core social information to perhaps... my Zola config file??
I'm back in my circular ways finding myself wanting to use Zola again. I have complaints about it not being perfect, but seemingly, I actually find it a lot easier to use than other engines. Maybe it's because I've spent so much time using Zola that I'm acclimated to it now, but after trying to move my site over to Hugo, I sort of regret even considering the move.
Hugo isn't necessarily bad, but the more I kept playing with it, the more inflexible I found it compared to Zola. Zola lets me throw whatever I want at the config, and I can probably access it very easily from a template. That didn't seem to be the case with Hugo, and I was immediately less interested in Hugo because of that. How I see it, the config file at the root of the project should be a convenient dictionary that you can read from globally from all template files, which is pretty much how Zola lets me use it.
Alright, so whatever, that's one issue with Hugo. Surely there are better things about it, right? Yeah definitely, like the ability to read other content files like Org-mode, which I was interested in since Markdown wasn't exactly cutting it for me. I started with a Hugo site, modified it's base level template, and tried hacking away with it copying much of my Zola stuff as possible.
Still, I didn't find it as "neat"; the syntax is much more verbose and overtly more bloated. There are these "partial" templates? What the heck is that? Archetype files? Singles versus lists? It doesn't come with a SASS/SCSS compiler? Okay, I guess I have to de-SASS my SASS styles from the other site...
It's all these weird nuances that I had to figure out as I went along that made me sort of lose hope. I could cut my losses and use someone else's template from the online Hugo template gallery, but honestly, I didn't like many of them, and I like the idea that I understand my site top-to-bottom so I know if I have an issue, I can address it myself. I take pride in my HTML design, because it's all handcrafted by me. It wouldn't feel like my site anymore if I used something I didn't make, I feel like that's a big part of the web we've let go in our pursuit of reducing workloads by following DRY principles. Nothing is personal, everything is templated.
I have been trying to forge my own path and replace Zola myself, but frankly, I have a lot of difficult life challenges ahead of me that require me to not be at the computer as much as I would like. I will carry on with Zola and try to augment my Zola experience as best as possible. I might even go on and go back and edit some posts with new 2023 insights I might have developed, remove stuff I don't like, and maybe do a few changes here and there.
I am happy to announce that I am moving from my current residence to a new apartment. It is fun and exciting; I have never lived in an apartment before, and the last few months of my life have been great/stressful with my current job situtation. The apartment is something I could never do without it, and I am thankful of my employment for this new journey.
I have only ever lived in household residences for almost my entire life. I have never once lived in a building with others. When my partner and I began our search for our new home, we put up some pretty high filters, and hoped to work our way down.
Our first priority is keeping our dog; it would suck if we had to give him up because we couldn't find housing. I toggled that on Zillow as a first priority. The next few options are features I would like to have, and mainly, faster laundry. I am not against shared laundry, but I feel like having a washer/dryer in-unit is a no-brainer to search for, because the time investment of having to leave the house/unit to wash and dry clothes is such a time-suck that just thinking about how much time you would lose over the course of a year is a nightmare. Granted, this is a big privilege ask, but losing hundreds of hours over a year is not fun. The physical stress of having to carry clothes back and forth is also not fun, and if laundry is not included anywhere on-site, then you would have to drive the clothes to a completely different location.
Parking is a big thing for us, since one of us has to drive to their physical work location, and the other has to take a train. We found an apartment that is right next to a train line, and has a parking lot, so that will help us drop from two cars to one. Cars are god damn expensive and I hate them. We can't avoid it forever due to where we live, but cutting our car count will save us quite a bit of money per year.
Lastly, we have gym memberships, but the thing I hate about the gym at present is driving to them (see my feelings about cars above). I have to spend hours of my day doing work, yet the motivation to work out is at an all-time low when I have to physically drag myself with a motor vehicle. I am a fan of boxing, and stopped doing boxing classes a number of years ago (too pricy; also have to drive). I would be more motivated to work out and improve my health if there was a convenience to it of it being somewhere close by. It just happens that the building we looked at also has a small gym in the base level of the building, which is a huge plus.
All these things ultimately add up to an apartment that I wouldn't call cheap, by any means. It might be better if we lived in a closet somewhere, but it's not fair to our dog and not fair to ourselves to treat ourselves like garbage for a years-long lease. The features that come with the new apartment are high, and it might seem expensive to myself right now on a calculator, but the hidden costs of everything else we do in life lurk behind shadows and don't make themselves as present. Hidden costs to me, would be:
I expect that by moving, we should save some time/money in some of these categories by:
I am probably missing some things, but this is my napkin math for now. We will be spending some more to live in a much-nicer apartment, but we will be happy, which is a problem we have been facing in our current living situation.
It's also funny in my head that I'm moving domains as I'm also physically moving.
Anyways, I liked the features, I liked the apartment, and my partner felt the same way, so we said yes. We will hopefully be moved in by next month, pending construction timelines on the unit. Moving will be less pleasant, but when is that ever a good time?
Two hobbies I've been taking up the mantle for in the last month are:
Janet is my ideal language replacement for Racket as it has a nice way of compiling to a C language compiler, which I find a very strong point. GuixOS is another thing I picked up to try and see how far I can get before I grow tired of it.
GuixOS I had to install with Nonguix as the non-free channel, and including substitute build servers for artifacts was a less-than-pleasant process surprisingly. I have a spare ThinkPad that I am not using as a daily driver, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I am currently on day 3 and I think I have a stable enough environment to begin playing around more.
So Janet I have been trying to send my spare time and energy towards when I have some creative power available. I created a repo with a goal in mind of me creating various difficulty programs with it. I started with a mimic copy of GNU cat, and I'm nearly done, but I haven't had much time to focus in perfecting it to completion just yet (mostly because newline counting and numbering is ... tedious).
Overall, still having a pretty decent time with Janet. It's quite not-a-Lisp, but it shares similar semantics to the point where I don't feel entirely lost. Linked lists don't exist and tables are akin to Lua, but I think it's still perfectly usable.
I hope to write more about Janet in the pending future.
That's it. That's all I got for now. I will be doing the work required to move this site to the new one. I am unsure about what kind of "proof" strategy I want to implement, but assuming my viewership is low, I might skip that anyway. I am going to include a social proof for Mastodon in my HTML template soon enough which should function just the same... Sorta.
Anyways, back to work, and I hope you check out the new domain ste5e.site soon enough!
(At the time of publishing, my car's "Check Engine" light went on and I don't know the actual problem)