Now

New Year, Same Me

Time flies and 2024 is already upon us!

I swear I say it every year but 2024 sounds like such a futuristic number.

After a quiet first half of 2023, I ended up producing a couple of blog posts towards the end of 2023 and have even set myself a goal using Beeminder to write at least one a month.

My default is a bit of a paradox where I’ll not write because I think I need to spend time to make something quality, only to churn out text in one sitting until I get bored and then just hit publish without doing any further edits or reviews.

As the old clay analogy goes, I’m better off making more posts and letting that result in quality than purely aiming for quality itself.

Maybe I’m already doing that though, just on a slowish timeline given I’ve already written a bunch of posts for the last few years.

Site Design

I recently moved my site from Hugo to Astro as more of a middle ground to add some fun to my site.

While my previous Hugo iteration had some progressive Javascript, it always felt a little stricter than I would like around Javascript tooling.

I still stand by the idea that most things should be static by default, and that will continue to be true but a little leeway around things like MDX are nice.

Interestingly, I was a bit sour on the idea of MDX for a long time but after some thought and experimentation, I realised that using shortcodes within Markdown is really no different if you squint.

There are some questions I have around syntax support (ie; would IA Writer consider .mdx to be a non-markdown file?) but I’ve written that much Markdown over the years that I’m not too worried. I rarely use stuff like header collapsing and other features.

I’d like to freshen up my site a little bit this year to make it stand out a bit more, homepage live player aside which is my pride and joy :‘)

Maybe my next post will finally be writing about how it all works on a technical level since it’s evolved quite a bit over the years