Howdy 👋

So I haven’t posted a blog post for a while…
That’s because I’ve been in the process of developing a new blog site! I’m lazy.

In between working a new job overseas, wedding work, finishing my final course at university (long story short, I thought I was done last term, but the university pulled a prank and told me I had one more course to do), and a bunch of other things, I haven’t found that much free time to sit down and write words on a screen (i.e. my blog). I’ll eventually post maybe one or two.. but maybe not because..

I’ve been in the process of developing a new blog site!

As much as Hugo (the site generator powering this blog) is nice, it hasn’t really kept up in terms of integrating modern web stacks. With an evergrowing number of useful plugins available for rehype and remark, the amount of dodgy scripts (story of my life) I’ll need to integrate them into the current workflow is.. painful.

Tech debt.

So enter Astro, the web framework that I’ll (likely) be developing (eventually) the new blog site in.
Instead of tying myself into exclusively sticking to components from Svelte, Vue, React, etcetera… Astro lets you use any framework in conjunction with others!

What about the WYSIWG editor?

Back when I was writing content for the Hugo-powered site, pages were written in Markdown. I’ll continue to be doing this, except in MDX (Markdown + JSX) - so that pages can be backed by JavaScript comments.

Whilst writing MD / MDX files is as simple as grabbing any text editor and whacking in a bunch of semantically understandable characters to set the formatting and style of words, it’s much nicer and pragmatic to use a “rich text”-eqsue (WYSIWG) editor. I’ve been using Forestry since late 2020, and whilst it’s been nice to have an editor that lets me embolden, italicise, and format my text - it’s missing image pasting functionality. Also it doesn’t really handle text with multiple italic formatting characters, and sometimes the code block breaks..

I’ve tried a few apps like Obsidian and Zettlr, but they don’t support the folder structure required by Astro (the image path referenced in the md/mdx file should be relative to a different folder). I’ve currently landed on MarkText which somewhat supports this requirement - but I’m open to any suggestions… It seems like a common issue, surely I’ve overlooked this problem???

On Hold

Before I actually begin the new blog site, I’ll first be trying out this Astro + MarkText blog stack on a smaller site that currently holds my work notes… Eventually you’ll see some post about it!

Nothing really interesting happened in this post, but thanks for reading up to now..
Hopefully you’ll see some new posts here soon 😅

Aside: Some stats, not that anyone asked

Unfortunately I don’t have stats from 2016-2018 (when I first put any sort of content online), but since 2019 I’ve amassed 26 thousand unique visitors! I don’t post any particularly common or popular topics - most of my posts are very niche to audio / visual things - so it’s always interesting to realise that there’s a community out there who are interested in what I do!

According to the stats, the most popular blog post was aNDI - my Android NDI® tools experiment - which got about 5 thousand page views! That’s closely followed by my post about UniFi APs on Standalone Mode, with 4.8k views. Next was my WiFi mod on a cheap pan tilt head, which attracted 3.1k visits.