So it’s been some time again since I last posted, which I feel like is to be expected at this point. I think I’ve just ended up being busy, or rather not really thinking about writing as much lately, and as such also ended up writing a lot less. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) I’d like to rename this blog to, as while I’m not sure how fitting the name currently is I also don’t really have any ideas what I’d like to change it to.

What I have changed, however, is moving the blog back to Hugo. This change was caused by a few things:

1. I wanted to move away from Cloudflare for all my services (this blog was the final thing that still needed moving)
2. I wanted to move away from using Ghost as my backend because they are deprecating MariaDB which I want to continue using over MySQL—I just don’t trust Oracle to be a good actor
3. Since I was changing things up anyway, I took the opportunity to simplify things, and moved back to a pure SSG-setup
4. I chose Hugo over continuing to use Eleventy because I would now be self-hosting these things instead of throwing everything into the cloud, and as such I just prefer having a single binary instead of the mess that is a JS-installation¹

I did do some exploring of other headless CMS but ended up deciding against moving to something else since I just kind of worried that I might end up in the same position I was in already with Ghost where I have to move again or the like due to some dependency changing, and also because it just ended up being one less thing that I need to maintain which is nice. I also don’t really have any problem with writing things in Markdown or other markup languages so the appeal of a more visual editor just isn’t really there for me. Sure, there are some convenience things that are a lot easier that I covered when I was first thinking of moving off Hugo and onto WordPress, but many of those things ended up being not that useful for me. For example, in the last iteration I already didn’t have any comments, because that ended up being annoying to implement with the headless setup I was using anyway; as for things like scheduling posts, I did it for fun several times but I’m just not sure if it adds any real value at the moment.²

I also used this opportunity to fix/re-implement some of the redirects I had going on before, that broke when I migrated over to Eleventy I think? This should mean some links that were broken should be working again now, which is nice. I feel somewhat embarassed about having contributed to link rot because of how frustrated I get at times when I see it on other sites, so hopefully all of that is fixed now. Other than that, as far as reader-facing changes go, there shouldn’t really be any yet.

Well, except for one small thing: the format of the links got somewhat updated again, all of my posts are now under the /post/ subfolder, or section as Hugo calls them. It doesn’t really affect the experience of browsing the site, but the links look a bit different once again.³

What sections mean, however, is that I can more clearly delineate some of the rough draft ideas I’ve had sitting around for a bit: dreams and fiction. It somehow didn’t (or at least doesn’t anymore) feel quite right to post these things simply into the main feed, but I have on occasion been writing my dreams down when I found them particularily interesting as a sort of dream diary, and it feels like sharing them under a different section from the main blog could be interesting. If I do end up doing that (still just thinking about the idea, but the change makes it easier to implement if I end up wanting to), it probably won’t mean that I would publish every dream I have, just the ones that seem interesting enough to do so with for whatever reason; maybe because they deal with a particular topic that might be of interest to someone else than me, or because they are just that strange.

As for fiction, it’s also something I kind of do want to write but never end up sitting down and just doing. I think one of my problesm there is that I like having done things more than doing them, so I get impatient while writing something like that and want to finish it which doesn’t really fit with my goal of also writing something somewhat longer form and as such my interest ends up fizzling out before I have the opportunity to finish actually writing anything. So I guess that means we’ll see if anything ever comes out of my idea to also include some fiction writing on this site, but at least the idea is there.

Beyond that, I’m also considering re-introducing a way to comment or at least somehow communicate back to me. As it stands, I don’t really give out any identifying information or channels to contact me on this blog, which while it has served me well so far I’m not sure if it is the way I want to keep things. Sure, the last time around when I had comments they weren’t really used, but maybe something like an about-page where I at the very least list an email address or some way to contact me might be a good thing to have available (though I have no doubt I would end up getting mostly spam to any such address).

For now though, that ends my ramblings on this topic, and I’ll get back to considering how to proceed from here. I would still kind of like to write more, but about what?

Felt like it was time to freshen up the blog again, even though I haven’t been writing as actively anymore. Just new colors, the layout/functionality has remained basically the same—though I did fix a small bug that occurred when a post didn’t have any tags. Also went back to specifying the font used instead of user preference, since this font just felt right.

It feels like I at some point need to rethink the branding on here, “Rambling Priest” just doesn’t really feel right anymore, not representative of who I am or the content. Probably should go with something that isn’t such a reference to World of Warcraft anymore since the content isn’t necessarily focused around the game anymore and more just about me and who I am. Not sure where to go with that as of yet though, so I suppose I’ll let it lie for now.

I didn’t end up writing about it at the time—which I now kind of regret since I’m no longer quite sure when exactly it was—but I ended up trying Linux again. Looking back at last time, it doesn’t necessarily feel like all that much has changed—though I don’t have the stuttering in World of Warcraft any more—except for perhaps no longer streaming and as such not having the hassle of setting that up, yet I’ve by now used it for several months and just been content.

There have certainly been some minor annoyances still, especially with how badly Battle.net performs, but overall it’s just been rather uneventful.

It feels a bit anticlimactic even, because I guess I was somehow expecting the change to be a bigger deal, which of course was a very misguided expectation but still. One of the really nice things however, is how much better the keyboard layouts are on Linux; specifically how many more things are accessible with Alt Gr or angry Alt.

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for months because I’m honestly just not sure what to say since it all has just been so normal, but somehow it still feels right posting about it since I’ve mentioned trying Linux before. So that’s the update I guess.

It would seem I needed something of a break from blogging—or at the very least I ended up taking one. It wasn’t really a planned thing, it more just ended up happening because I just didn’t know what I wanted to write about and ended up not doing it—which was later on exacerbated by me doing some reconfiguration of my server and consequently needing to reinstall my blogging software before being able to actually continue writing. All of this caused a somewhat extended break.

I’m also not sure if this post actually signifies an actual end to that break or what my plan is going forwards, though I do still really enjoy writing and actually having the blog so I do have that going for me which is nice.

I guess the last few months—or perhaps even this year in general—have been somewhat rougher on me again. Not only did blogging take a back seat, but the habit of a daily walk that I had built up has also been more of a struggle lately with more frequent breaks/missed days than at any other point of me doing it. It’s still definitely more days with walks than without, and I don’t think I’ve actually missed two days in a row at any point, but there has definitely been a general decline. Perhaps I should start tracking this in some way? Though whether such data would be motivating or demotivating I’m not sure…

In more positive news, I think I’m slowly starting to build up confidence in there actually existing a future for me that I want to live in, and while I’m not yet at the point of taking any concrete steps towards it I am starting to feel like it will be possible to do so in a reasonable time frame which helps a lot to making it feel actually doable.

It seems I find myself in a new place: pessimistic about the present but more optimistic about the future. Perhaps this insight will help me in taking those concrete steps to actually get there?

I’m struggling a bit with the blog at the moment. I’m not sure what exactly is the problem, but I just don’t seem to have any real idea what I want to write on the schedule I had set for myself—weekly—which means I have for the past two weeks just ended up not writing, which feels bad.

It feels a bit strange, since it’s not really a case of motivation—I keep thinking about wanting to write and potential things I could write—I just don’t know what I actually do want to write. I have some ideas floating in my drafts folder, but they all feel either too big or too small or simply too unripe.

This has had me thinking if I just end up formally giving up on the idea of regular posts on the blog and going back to posting and writing more sporadically. At the same time, as noted, I do still keep thinking about writing and it is still something I want to do, and there is a certain level of fear of this change then relegating writing to something I barely end up doing because I keep simply forgetting to do so if it isn’t regular enough.

At the moment, I am then faced with a dilemma: keep pushing through and trying to write, or just decide enough is enough and wind down my efforts a bit. I’m not quite sure what I’ll end up doing, but maybe what I have been doing unintentionally is the proper approach to the situation: keep thinking about ideas and writing on the regular schedule as before, but be kind to myself and accepting of not perhaps being able to actually do the writing on a weekly basis. This would both keep it as something I’m actively working on in my memory as well as like right now, afford me opportunities to almost spontaneously decide to write something, while still reducing the pressure and guilt of not doing so.

Writing the above, once again reminded me of why it is that I want to keep writing so much: it’s just such a great way to process things, because writing something down forces me to actually think about what I am writing.

This is something that has been gnawing on me for the past couple of weeks due to having missed those deadlines, and in writing this I’m forced to actually confront those feelings and to put them into perspective. It’s not a new revelation for me, but sometimes I do need the reminder.

It also feels interesting to note that even prior to having written this, I feel like I was handling the situation better from an emotional perspective than I would have before, in being more forgiving to myself of the mistakes I have made, which means that while it might at times feel like I keep on going in circles with the things I write and think about, there is also learning and improving happening at the same time.

I probably really should reconsider the whole diary thing, shouldn’t I?