It’s been a while, huh.

Looking at the archives, I haven’t updated this site in over four years. Quite a bit has changed in that time: an entire US presidential cycle, my three-and-a-half-year job at Microsoft Teams has come and gone, COVID-19 is still here, I had to say goodbye to our kitty, I bought a house, the entire nature of social media has radically changed, we lived through the boom and bust of NFTs, I played way too much Final Fantasy XIV, I fell down the VTuber rabbit hole, I joined my partner’s business running behind-the-scenes operations, I’ve started researching and experimenting with large language models and generative coding, and plenty more. I work at Kickstarter now as a senior iOS engineer, because it seems more vital than ever to build tools for creatives to get funding for projects, which also means I’m a union member now.

The good news is that I can build the website again, and I’ve already made a few minor changes, such as burning Twitter off of here updating my social links to point to Mastodon and Bluesky, and adding an automatic dark mode across the site. I have never been a great “blogger,” so I am also planning to adjust the site’s structure and design to be more focused around collections of pages rather than blog posts. For example, I love video games, and I want to organize and write about some of the games I really enjoy; a page about my Warrior of Light in Final Fantasy XIV would be a great archive for my own enjoyment. My website is for me as much as for you.

Given the decaying state of social media, the general fracturing of society along ideological lines, and the ongoing reality of the dead internet theory, it feels as good a time as any to try and kick the tires on maintaining my own personal internet garden again. I still believe in the tenets of the IndieWeb, and want to support those technologies where I can, along with bridging to the fediverse and maybe run a PDS with the blog content. I want to try to maintain a positive outlook here, but also with a critical eye on systemic and corporate levers of power. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it up, but hey. Nothing ever happens without intentionally starting it.

Until then, please consider tossing me back on your RSS reader such as Feeder or NetNewsWire. Thank you very much!

As of now my personal website should support WebSub on all pages, posts, and the RSS feed (basically everything linked in the sitemap). If you have the capability to subscribe to pages via WebSub, you should be able to point it at any page on this site and get notified when that page updates. That’s maybe not the most useful on individual pages, but it is useful for the home page, or if you want to be able to subscribe to individual tags or projects.

This should work well with social readers that let you subscribe to websites, at least in concept. To go with that, I’ve updated the microformats across much of the site to make them accessible to those readers. Things appear alright in web-based validators but I’ve been having trouble getting those changes to appear in the readers themselves. Hopefully that will fix itself as caches expire. But it’s one step further down the road of being a good IndieWeb citizen.

Behind the scenes, WebSub support is handled by Webmaster, my custom-built server that integrates with my Gatsby build system. When GitLab finishes building, it sends a webhook to Webmaster that signals that the site has changed, causing Webmaster to fetch the sitemap and scan the ETag of each file in it for changes. If any of those ETags are different from what’s already known, then that page has changed. The WebSub subscribers for that URL are fetched and notified with the changes. No WebSub hub necessary, but down the road I could switch to one pretty easily.

If you’re reading this, then that means I’ve finished upgrading my website to Gatsby 2. Gatsby is a static site generator that uses React and GraphQL to build the entire website as a set of static HTML files, which I used to build this version of my website. Version 2 has a number of really promising improvements like a component for querying GraphQL from anywhere and improved Webpack and Babel support (which will hopefully let me start trickling in some TypeScript).

The well documented migration process was not as smooth as I’d hoped, but that was to be expected. Gatsby does require some comfort with debugging Webpack and React apps before you can really use it well, and this was no different. The biggest reason for this was that I had a .babelrc file at the root of my project which was causing some difficult to debug problems (and ones with no search results). Ultimately the most important thing I did was to just throw that file out and replace it with the default, a step that is not emphasized enough in the docs. It certainly could have gone much worse and once I discovered this source of my problems, it was much smoother sailing.

Overall the migration took about 8 hours. This included time spent following the migration guide and debugging problems, as well as modernizing some of the new tools in Gatsby 2. Namely, the use of the new StaticQuery API for inlining queries. An example of this is that lovely little photo of me that’s on every page. Previously in Gatsby 1, each page had a single GraphQL query that could be run, so everything had to be shoved in there, including for images like that photo. That meant each page had duplicated query logic for fetching that image. Now, that has been rolled into a component that uses StaticQuery to fetch the image, which simplifies the page-level queries quite a bit. There’s a few ways I use that kind of pattern to clean up the site. You shouldn’t notice anything, but it makes working on the site here much simpler, especially if I want to add something that relies on a query.

I’ve been avoiding ripping this bandage off for awhile, but now it looks like it’s done and I can start using the new features. Gatsby’s got a rich plugin library, including some powerful integrations with service workers. I had this enabled originally but shut it off because it couldn’t detect cache changes very well with it, but Gatsby 2’s updated version of Webpack should make that more viable. There’s also some new query tracing tools which will help me get build times down; right now it takes about 3 minutes to build on the (admittedly very slow) server I run it on, and I’d like to get that to be under a minute. And I am dying to start moving stuff to TypeScript, which Babel 7 now supports.

Congratulations to the Gatsby team on shipping and doing such a huge release!