A year of website zakkerdabbletinkering
2025-04-24 21:25
I've been maintaining a website and blog of some sorts for around a year now, so I thought it'd be a good time to look back and sumarise my journey for a bit of reflection. At the end I'll ponder my way forward. I see this activity as much a place for me to tinker, modify and construct the thing, or hack the thing that makes the thing, as it is a place to blog and write. But also, it is a place where I can regain ownership, create my own path, do whatever I want really. It is a website, and I own it. Of course, ownership can be interpreted in different ways, and I use the term pretty loosely.
Caveat - In 2001, I created my very first website with Microsoft FrontPage, which I would love to share and revisit, however the files are long gone, and memories of them quite hazy. I do remember though they were absolute diarrhetic masterpieces where I basically hacked the viewers screen, duplicating mouse cursors and shaking the screen every time they clicked. I mucked around a lot with image mapping and a WAREZ version of Adobe Photoshop at the time too. Fun times, but it was probably just me avoiding homework. In 2018 I attempted a couple of websites on Wordpress and Blogger.com. They lasted no more than 2 posts, and really not much effort put into them worth diving into. Anyway, I'll leave them out of the picture as I really think it's just this past year that I've gone deep on this stuff.
I've linked in some posts of blogs and sites that I don't really maintain any more. Take everything with a grain of salt. I get a lot of ideas, post them online, and totally contradict myself later. Some sites I've taken down completely, others remain collecting dust until I do something about it. It has been fun to revisit them though, and I still enjoy reading the aggregates there.
Here's a rough timeline for the past year:
2024... A lot of things aligned in my life in a short period, internally and externally, to get me back into the web groove. I was working in a new role that wasn't aligning well with me, was battling some running injuries, and had COVID for the first time. Safe to say, I was in a pretty dark place. Because I couldn't do much physically, I had more tech time. That usually happens when I get sick or injured. My new role wasn't giving me my usual creative output either. I don't know where I first saw it, but this thing called the fediverse kept popping up. Thought I'd give it a go. Here's one of my first posts from my mastodon.social instance:
I've only just discovered the #fediverse and found out #indieweb and #smallweb are what you call those cool, fun, real websites I've missed so badly.
I feel like I've just opened a door that I've only ever heard muffled crys of joy from the other side. It's completely bonkers in here. So much creativity. Am I late to the party or is it just getting started?
I owe a lot of my inspiration from there. I think from the get-go it wasn't about the content on the Fediverse or Mastodon itself, but all the links everyone was sharing to their own blogs and websites. I was also a bit of an Obsidian nerd so immediately wondered how I could be part of this and make a website from my Obsidian notes. It seemed just the right amount of difficulty and fun for me.
That post ^ is from June 22 2024, when I was quite happy with my little space on micro.blog (I don't know why that website still works... I stopped payment 7 months ago). The post outlines all the tools and plugins and services I tinkered with for the prior two months. It's a common post you'll see on a platform like micro.blog. I tried to outline the beauty of frictionless writing on simple platforms like micro.blog, Pika and bearblog. We usually fall onto them after exhaustion from trying over-complicated setups. Clearly that's what happened to me:
Been trying a bunch of Obsidian / GitHub Pages deploying thingymabobs with Jekyll / Quartz / Obsidian GitHub Publisher, Obsidian Digital Garden blah blah and they’ve pretty much all broken on me, I have no idea how to fix them, and don’t have the desire to allocate the attention needed. Going to simplify. There are plenty of options that are looking good. These two are grabbing me: Pika, Micro.blog
I also mention I was tinkering with a HTML and CSS on a Neocities account. Well, on July 27 2024, only a month later, I was posting publicly on there, and here I am still. That site is called html-chunder simply because that was what it looked like to begin with (if you look under the hood it still isn't pretty), and I never got around to changing it. Around that time I also did The Odin Project's Foundation Course on HTML, CSS, git, flexboxing and VS Code. That gave me a huge boost of skills, especially around use of git.
But I jumped forward a bit. There was another blog in between. Let's zip back to July 21 2024, when I found smol.pub:
Hi there. Thanks for reading. What a pleasant nook of the web. I really like the simplicity. I am here to learn, and to log my learning. I am not restricting myself to any particular topic, so we shall see. I have some things in mind however. Feel free to email me to say hello or offer feedback on anything I'm writing about. Thanks to the hosts for this public space.
And July 22 2024 when I decided to try and install Linux for the first time:
I'm keen to finally give Linux a crack. So, here we go. I know next to nothing about Linux so this could be a complete failure.
My plans at the moment are to use the laptop for simple tasks (like blogging here) and maybe some kind of media player.
Now things started escalating as I started to mix my exploration of Linux and the command line with blogging and websites. I think my first few quick-posts sums up my fumbling excitement well:
date = 2024-07-27 11:00:00
This is my first blog post. I've written and published this web page entirely from the command line. Amazeballs.
date = 2024-07-27 12:00:00
Not entirely sure how I'll style the website just yet. Needs dark/light options at least. There's some out of the box themes I could use but that's boring...
date = 2024-07-29 17:38:00
Bleh. Web design is hard! Going around in circles but getting there. Working on flexing, CSS and the Tera template engine. This isn't the finished product, but a simple design to get me familiar with some bits and pieces.
date = 2024-07-29 21:07:00
Now all I have to do is type in "blog" and start writing. test test.
$ blog Enter blog title: blogging from the command line Enter slug name: cli Write (Ctrl+D to finish): Now all I have to do is type in "blog" and start writing. test test.date = 2024-07-29 21:18:26
I actually can't believe I got this working.
date = 2024-07-29 22:41:41
Oops looks like I need to configure how it looks on the mobile. Stretching and shrinking and stuff. Get the atom feed working too. Will throw the link up when I get a chance if anyone wants to follow along with this utter mess.
I still use that blog.sh script above, and write all my posts and edit HTML and CSS in a terminal emulator, but I've modified the script a bit, and use a saved zellij terminal workspace layout with panes for writing, backing up with lazygit, navigating with yazi and using alias shortcuts for neocities-cli and async-neocities. This is what a typical quick-post looks like for me:
When I created my smol.pub space I was also introduced to gemtext and the Gemini protocol. I didn't dive into that until a bit later. My posts were being cross-posted to the protocol, but I never ventured in. Around November 2024 that changed and I started using the Gemini client amfora, later lagrange to browse the pages. It inspired me enough to try my hand at a the HTML-to-gemlog service MyGemini.Space. Like smol.pub, I liked the simplicity of posting from a web browser. It was something I could do on my phone, which I still can't do (easily) with my Neocities website. By this stage though, I didn't really feel the need to have another outlet as my website was covering quite a bit anyway, and I also had smol.pub which was starting to collect dust..
Sidenote - I sometimes wonder about having alternative identities on the web. I know some people do this, and I kinda get it. There are many reasons around creative exploration, privacy and whatnot, but ultimately I feel like it'd be too exhausting to maintain. Instead, I like to dedicate my spaces to certain styles of writing or topics. This way I can still be myself, but write at different levels of quality on wide ranges of topics. Not boxed in.
So yeah, I felt like I had a lot of freedom with html-chunder, creating anything from "blogs" to "quick-posts" to "crop-logs", and now I've gone even broader with different websites entirely - notes.zkbro.com, and gmi.zkbro.com, my new Gemini space, which I intend to mirror notes.zkbro.com posts. The Gemini site has a "tinylog" as well, which I see as the Gemini version of "quick-posts" but I intend to use as purely tech notes as I tinker out loud.
I want to leave this here from Juan on authenticity and the personal blog:
Personal blogs, free from brand guidelines and marketability constraints, offer a unique opportunity for creative exploration. They are a haven for experimenting with ideas, design, writing styles, and various topics, fostering personal growth and skill development in a stress-free environment.
I've certainly felt I've embodied that in these spaces.
I've stuck with the name zkbro for my sites, really out of lazyness. It is just a short version of my name, something I use for usernames regularly because of its minimal keystrokes. Since I don't go by any alternative identities, I use it for everything now.
I bought the domain zkbro.com on January 10 2025 for $10.66 for 12 months. It is the sole ongoing cost of my website hobby. html-chunder is hosted on the Neocities free account. It was hard to stomache the $8/month subscription to micro.blog. I'm a bit of a tight-ass. With all the photos on html-chunder I will likely get to my storage limit, and have to think about my next steps. I'm currently using 21.2% of 1 GB of storage. I'll likely look to host my own when I hit 1GB, or at least moving the photos locally.
notes.zkbro.com and gmi.zkbro.com are already self-hosted. After getting a Raspberry Pi 4 earlier this month as a birthday present, I started to learn about running a server. A couple weeks later I had those two up and running. Creating those websites were the perfect little projects to get started. It's been challenging, and it's a bit rough around the edges, but I'm learning a tonne.
Suprising myself with a Gemini capsule:
Right now, I'm really enjoying the combo of my three spaces - html-chunder, notes.zkbro.com and gmi.zkbro.com. I think their purposes are clearly different, and are in a state that I can start to beef them up with content. There will be some cross-posting, which is ok because I want options in how I go back to posts (they are a reference for me afterall). I don't always want to visit my notes in the terminal. Sometimes it's easier just going to the website.
I also want to build on my workflow. The blog.sh script is out of date and only useful for three types of posts on html-chunder. I'll probably just expand on the script and my use of zellij and templates. It has worked pretty well so far. There'll be some more thought around cross-posting. Something I haven't got into here, but my three spaces are vastly different in terms of text format and frontmatter requirements.
I'd like to work on the python script that generates my weekly activity elevation charts in the header each week. The profiles page is a bit ugly and could do with a bit more love too.
If you made it this far, well done. I always find it hard to set my boundaries for what I'm writing about, and usually cut it really short feeling a bit down I didn't dive into all the tangents I want to go into. I kept this one going a bit longer, but there were still areas I wanted to talk about more. I didn't even mention the static site generators I use. I'm going to leave it here though as my interest is waning and I'm afraid I'll just delete the whole thing. It was fun to revisit the year. I'm actually quite proud of how much I've learnt to date. Maybe I'll do deeper dives in future posts. Bye now.
Oh, sign my text-wall if you haven't already :)