Rebooting...

2026-07-08

It's been 8 months since my last post on here. Yikes.

What happened?

Disclaimer: Since it's been a while, I don't remember all the details clearly. This is just an explanation based on what I recall from back when I stopped.

I originally created this blog because I wanted to play with some new toys, namely Zola (the static site generator) and Jujutsu/JJ (the version control system). Of course, those tools are cool (and even cooler now than they were back then), but unfortunately, I was/am absolutely hooked on content consumption (i.e., YouTube), and that absolutely saps away my motivation and free time. (Maybe I'll make a post about it later...)

Additionally, I kept putting up these self-imposed "blocks" regarding the blog. My first priority back then was to make the blog look much less sketchy. That meant the first task was to make a favicon (because having a favicon = trustworthy, definitely), which meant I had to draw a logo, which meant I had to plan out a color scheme... and so the tasks pile up, and procrastination would like to introduce itself.

I did give it a try at some point, but turns out I'm not much of a visual artist. I opened up inkscape and just stared at the user interface. That's pretty much my last memory of working on this blog.

We're back?

Well, I've gotten a bit sick of content consumption over the last 8 months. I feel like I've been living some kind of groundhog day where I wake up late, go to work or class, come home, consume content to "recover", then sleep late. And on weekends, it's just more "recovery". For the most part, my life has been like that for quite a few years. Somewhat recently, I've had the recurring thought of

"If my life was a movie, it would be the most boring movie ever made."

which eventually progressed into

"DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT!"

Anyway, after being on YouTube for the Nth time, I got recommended a video suggesting content creation as a means to break a cycle of content consumption. I didn't even watch it, but something somewhat clicked (over a period of ~4 months when the idea pops into my head every so often). Unlike content consumption, content creation results in things being created. Things that can be built up over time to remind myself that I'm not living in a loop.

Honestly, that logic doesn't entirely check out now that I've written it all out. Either way, I want to start writing stuff again, so let's see how things turn out this time!

Moving Ahead

You might've noticed, but there's been a few changes around. Yes, yes, I did mention earlier that "making the site less sketchy" was one of the reasons I ended up giving up on this blog. But! Due to some life circumstances, I've had to work with some web development lately. As a result, web development is less daunting and is actually kinda... fun?

Anyway...

Moved to Cloudflare Workers

For some context, I was originally serving this blog via Cloudflare Pages + GitHub CI integration.

During my hiatus, I ended up playing around a bit with self-hosting. One such self-hosted thing I tried was Forgejo. However, I didn't really want to go through the hassle of setting up Woodpecker CI (I already suffered enough setting up Forgejo), so I needed a different method to serve my blog. Additionally, Cloudflare has been urging users to migrate from Pages to Workers since April 2025, so I decided to just take out two birds with one stone and handle the migration at the same time. I ended up learning how wrangler works, and eventually set up a neat build script to build and deploy my site to CF Workers.

Some Design Work

I've gotten better at using Inkscape recently, and so I finally decided to tackle the blog logo. I had the neat realization that the enter key makes for a pretty nice logo, given that once pressed in a text editor, a new line (or row :D) is created below the cursor. With that in mind, I used the colors from the Mirage and Dark variants of the Ayu Theme to put together something nice. (Technically, it's approximately a 1.4545u key. I realized this only after cleaning up the svg code manually and I really don't want to do that again. Let's just pretend it's 1.5u.)

Also, turns out that getting an SVG favicon to react to dark and light mode across firefox and chrome is not exactly straightforward. The trivial method of just doing:

<head>
    <link rel="icon" href="/favicon-light.svg" type="image/svg+xml" media="(prefers-color-scheme: light)" />
    <link rel="icon" href="/favicon-dark.svg" type="image/svg+xml" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" />
</head>

doesn't work on Firefox (but it does in Chrome), so I ended up needing to add a custom <style> block into my SVG to have it adapt. On the bright side, there's only one SVG favicon to worry about now. (It has just dawned on me that I've prepared a dual-theme logo for a site that doesn't even support two themes yet 🤦.)

Also, as you can probably tell from the logo, I've decided to go for a bit more of a rounded look for my blog to make it come across as less serious. To propagate this rounded look throughout my blog, I decided to pivot away from using Inter. I originally considered Nunito, but after seeing this post, I just couldn't unsee some aspects of it. Therefore, I settled on SN Pro since that post kind of sold me on it. Guess I'm gonna serve as free advertisement for the font. (Disclaimer: I am neither affiliated with nor endorse the Supernotes app. I just like the font, which they kindly open sourced.)

Closing Words

I'm back! Hopefully for longer than 3 actual posts this time.

I'll also be trying out the 100 Days to Offload challenge to try and write more.