This is the first post that is not just a random topic! I wanted to take some time and write down my thoughts on the website, what I've done until now, and what I want to change & fix in the future!
First and foremost: What's up with the name? Well, it sounds cool, doesn't it? Isn't that enough? No? Okay.
It's basically a piece of world building. A church or temple frozen in time moments before the universe succumbs to entropy. Who built it? What is its purpose? For whom was it made? Can I visit? I don't really know. It's just a strong image or idea in my head. For now. I might build further upon the idea, or I'll just leave it as a concept.
I always wanted a personal website. For me, it's like a canvas on which I can paint whatever I want at any moment. A little personal footprint of me and brain in the depths of the internet. There is no ambition to make it a huge thing, although if I ever get good enough that people actually want to read my posts, that would be awesome!
The site is pretty basic. Everything you see is static content, every page you visit exists as its own file. Which makes writing blog posts annoying. In the backend, I build the site with Astro, so using layouts saves me from a lot of repetitive work. I have to write these posts with the html, and spell checking in Notepad or in VSCode is available, but not very good. One of the next things on my to-do list is to write myself a little tool, maybe in Python, that just generates the Astro files for me from plain text. I know there are other ways that might me more efficient, or even easier solutions, but I enjoy the little coding exercises, and making a convoluted toolchain that only I can use is a bit of a IT classic.
So besides the blog, what will be on the site? Basically everything I make. With the blog as central hub. The site is in a working state, but there are a few more things to do. The mobile layout is a mess. The operating system look doesn't really work for it, so I'll have to restyle that. I already mentioned a better way to write the blog posts. And also backups. I am notorious for not caring enough about it.
At this date, the website (and the GoToSocial) instance are hosted at home on my Raspberry Pi 4. I want to have complete control over my content, so my social media and personal webpage can disappear from the internet by just unplugging the power from it. Right now, I am running a manual daily backup from my laptop to an external harddrive. I really need to automate this. I have an external M.2 drive, which the PI seems to not supply enough power to, so that's not a solution. For now, I might use a mechanical HDD with an external power supply, that I have lying around, to do the daily backups, and then transfer them over once a week to another drive. I am really trying to avoid storing anything in a cloud.
I have two more parts of the site that I want to add. One is favourites, the other one is dev & games. Dev & games should be pretty self-explanatory. Anything I develop will be put there in a neat format. Tools, apps, or games. But that is a bit further off.
Favourites is actually the next thing I want to build. I just want a space to share anything I find cool. Could be books, music, games, videos etc... I haven't really decided how I want this to look, but I have ideas like hooking it up to Spotify/Apple Music to show my most listened tracks this month, or youtube to automatically show videos I've put into a "favourites" playlist. It's supposed to be a little handcrafted library of cool shit, which I hope to share with people!
This is it for now. There is plenty to-do, and I don't think the webpage will ever be finished. That's okay, it's an evolving project in which I can pour many more hours into!
See you tomorrow! I'll be back with a more random topic!
- Cass