There are two types of people: those who make backups and those who will experience a system breakdown. Fortunately I was in the former category, but it was still a very tedious and stressful experience. Every problem is also an opportunity to grow and throw off dead weight, so I used the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and switch my operating system.
In January 2019 I switched the static site generator for this website from Pelican to a custom one written in GNU Guile. Most (or all?) static site generators out there have an opinion on what a website should be made of. You might have full control over the layout and content of individual pages, but not so much over how the web site itself is composed. Writing my own static site generator freed me from these constraints. Now if I want to have sub-sites and multiple blogs I can do so. However, the custom generator was suffering from the same problem: it had one specific web site composition in mind, it just happened that this time it fit my needs. That is why I have created HSSG: the Hackable Static Site Generator.
Git is a decentralized version control system, meaning that there is no one superior repository. Every single copy of a Git repository is just as complete as any other. Of course we can pick one particular repository and declare it to be the one source of truth, the “upstream” repository. Usually this upstream repository is then hosted on some server, and if we are interested in openness and collaboration this server is part of a larger web service, called a “forge”. Out of these forges GitHub is perhaps the most popular one. Unfortunately this means if we are interested in contributions we have to make the GitHub repo our upstream and use its web services and web UI for our workflow. At least that is the common wisdom, but it does not have to be that way.
I have decided to open up a GitHub sponsor page. Recently I released the Neovim plugin nvim-ts-rainbow2, which has garnered a lot of stars, so I figured I might as well try this sponsor thing. There is also a Monero wallet for those who prefer to forgo the middle-man.
I really, really did not want to do this, but I have rewritten this website again from scratch. This time I’m going all in on the JavaScript ecosystem: TypeScript, Tailwind and Astro. And no, I’m not kidding.