Look who’s back!

Man, am I terrible at trying to be consistent about maintaining this website (and every other iteration of a personal website I’ve ever had). It’s been two-and-a-half months since I published my first journal entry on this site, and I thought I had a good head of steam going. I was ready to really put in the effort to make this the personal website that I’ve always wanted.

But that didn’t happen.

I got too bogged down experimenting with little things, falling into rabbit holes, and generally not wanting to put in the time or effort the website should receive. But now, I’m back to try once again.

Immediate goals

Links and bookmarks

I have to set up some goals to keep me on track. After watching Bastian’s video on using Kirby as a bookmarking tool, I got inspired to try and add similar functionality to this site. I wanted to be able to collect cool links to share and save, and what Bastian demonstrated was very close to what I had in mind.

But it didn’t do everything I thought I would want it to do, which is perfectly acceptable as the video was not meant to be a very advanced tutorial on how to create such functionality. What I was hoping for was a situation where I could specify a URL I wanted to share and have some of the meta details from that page be collected on my site for posterity’s sake and to include alongside any thoughts I wanted to add about the page. I know that Kirby supported hooks, and I thought that maybe that was part of the solution, so I found the Discord thread about the screencast and posted my thoughts there. Kindly, a member of the Kirby Discord, Tobias Wolf, provided some direction on how he does almost exactly what I wanted with his site (note that you probably need to be a member of the Kirby Discord to view the linked message thread?), and even provided a Gist of his setup. I’ve since been tinkering and altering his Gist to fit my own wants, and things are very close to being exactly the way I want them to be here on this site. I’m hoping to finish this functionality here in the next few days and begin using it.

Much thanks, Tobias!

Likes and replies

Beyond simply sharing links, I’d also like to use Indieweb concepts and protocols to “like” and reply to other people’s website posts. Again, I look to someone like Jeremy Keith and how he uses his website as the de facto source of a lot of his online reactions instead of relying on siloed websites to act on his behalf. Aaron Parecki is someone else who does this really, really well.

Structuring

As with everything I seem to do, I’ve been planning on how to do all of this on this site for quite some time. But I always tend to overthink how I actually want to implement it all.

Right now, I have a journal section for more traditional blog posts, like this one. Do my likes, replies, links/bookmarks, check-ins, photo posts (another content type I would like to support) all fall under my journal? Or are they their own separate sections? I want to offer RSS feeds, but do I include all content of this site in one massive feed? Or do I separate each content type into their own feeds?

I shared this internal debate with my wife this afternoon, and after some discussion, I think I’ve decided on keeping these things in their own separate sections, and then offering both a firehose of all-encompassing content from this site in one feed while also supporting specific types as individual feeds.

So that’s the plan

I like this: having a few very reasonable next steps to pursue to get this site going.