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Another document your progress post, because it's both "lessons learned" week of Blaugust, and because it's a core principle of the IndieWeb movement, and so it's a core principle around here, too:

You've made a place to speak your mind, use it to document your processes, ideas, designs and code. Help others benefit from your journey, including your future self!

Recording things on pages; or, Blaugust lessons learned

I think it's safe to say that Blaugust 2024 hasn't inspired a huge outpouring of blog posts from me, but it has cemented this website as a place where I publish things, even if only for myself. Some examples:

• I've started reading for a book club, so I was tempted to brush off my old GoodReads account. But I decided I didn't need to; I could record everything here. So now I have a page for recording my reading, and I published a post on the first book I read for the club.

• My wife and I have started pub quizzing, and man, I love recording statistics. So now there's a page for that.

• I'm playing a lot of World of Warcraft, and I want to keep track of what I've done and what I'm still working on, but I don't always feel there's an entire blog post in it. So, a day-log style page.

• I've been keeping up with recording when I visit interesting places with my /checkins post type. For example: winning the pub quiz, again, a terrible comedy night. These aren't full-on blog posts, usually just a sentence or two.

Postroll implemented

The last time I wrote about this site's development, I mentioned being inspired by JCProbably's writing on having a postroll. Since then, I've gone ahead and implemented a variation for myself.

My postroll is located at, unsurprisingly, /postroll, with an archive of all my bookmarks at /bookmarks. My public bookmarks are probably the least interesting thing I publish here, so I won't dwell on this particular bit of development!

A new post type: image galleries

I've wanted a way to publish photos (and screenshots) online for a while, and didn't have a good plan for it. I've created a simple gallery page that covers the basics. There's this work-in-progress Warcraft gallery as a test ground/first example as I continue to tweak it. I think it's basically good enough for my simple needs -- the mobile view could still do with a few adjustments.

Behind the scenes

Slightly improved some of the static content generating code, and set up a daily cron job to backup this entire site to my Dropbox account. My good friend SC wrote me a simple web UI for adding new posts, which is particularly handy for bookmarks and notes.

Future plans

More actual blog posts (I have few drafts...), and keeping up with the various pages and post types outlined above. A better way of showing what's actually new on the front page, which currently requires a visitor to click around the Navigation sub-section, which isn't entirely intuitive or inviting. Galleries need improving on small displays, and then I want to go back through my photographs and publish a few more from the last few years. I also have my old Twitter archive and an old Wordpress blog database dump, and I'm planning on republishing the "best of".

I'm pretty pleased with how things are going.