Spring Tyme!
Time to fix this broken site!

It’s that time of year! Time for me to start losing my mind!

As is customary, I became possessed by the cleaning spirit. I always accept the spontaneous need to intensely de-clutter, so I did that. I pondered how so many new objects made their way into my home, concluded they walked right in on their own uninvited, and also lamented the true reality of consumption: everything we produce will eventually end up in a landfill, and recycling, resale, and reuse only prolongs the inevitable. But that is another post for another time.

As usual, the cleansing of the meatspace eventually made its way to the hallowed halls of the grand Neonauticon, and a great shuffling of bytes commenced. Having the old Hugo tagged entries on the same page as Ctrl+F entries gives me mental hives, so I redesigned the microblog for 2022 onward.

I always knew deep down I couldn’t truly leave my old Hugo design behind until I FIXED EVERYTHING I BROKE which is just ugh but a timely email from local grocer spurred me to action, so I dutifully entered my castle and began searching for the meat in the walls.

To be fair, all of some of a teeny tiny itty bit of the formatting mess is the result of bad habits. Pasting rows of urls without properly marking them as a list. Manually centering images. (For shame, neonaut.) Not identifying code blocks. Config conflicts.

• Fixed broken code blocks, which was caused by:
• Having 2 syntax highlighters listed in config.yaml
• Not identifying the code type (e.g. js, python) after the ``` notation
• Fixed dead default icons on category/tag pages by removing that line of template code
• Fixed unconverted markdown image links by removing <center> tags. I found markdown images would not properly convert to HTML if they were surrounded by any HTML tag. This was a new issue after updating Hugo I never got around to investigating.
• Resized and optimized all the microblog images. I think I must have changed my CSS at some point but there's no reason to have have blurry oversized images of card games anyway so I reduced most by 50%.
• Added list markers to my many, many linklists so they would render as a neat vertical list rather than a horizontal, unreadable mess.

To be fair to Hugo, all of this stuff is honestly A Webmaster Problem and not a generator problem, but the process only reaffirmed my decision to move away from Hugo. Coding pages by hand is a more work in the short-term, but the tradeoff is 100% control over the output and my site won’t unexpectedly break when I upgrade something. Isolating pages and not having elements like navbars, which are redundancies that require upkeep, gives the pages a capsule-like longevity. Also it preserves my current style and aesthetic, good or bad. A lot of people understandably don't want a Frankenstein site, but I do!

To formally mark the end of that era, I have officially migrated to Microblog 2.0 (better name forthcoming, I hope). I briefly considered naming it Meatblog , but uh… that’s taken. Also, it's not exclusively about meatspace activities. Then again, the microblog is the meat of the site... hmmm.