For less than $5 a month you can have space on a web server. For a few bucks a year you can have your own domain name. With a computer at the public library and a plain text editor you can then publish a website that can be seen more or less all over the world. THAT IS PUNK ROCK. It just requires a tiny bit of knowledge and effort to do your own thing. You should do it.
OK, yeah, I’ve been reading a lot lately. I’ve been sick with the flu, and I have a new iPad Mini I got specifically for reading blogs and RPG rulebooks.
This is a pretty good article.
https://neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/
Worth spending a few minutes to read, especially this stuff about the tracking that happens on most corporate websites.
Well, I got a new iPad Mini for Christmas.
Part of me, for years, has considered acquisition of an iPad to be a huge waste of money. I only really want it for reading blogs and reading RPG rulebooks and supplements.
Then a few days ago I decided that as a now 60-year old man with sufficient income, who is a law abiding citizen, public servant, and all-around nice guy, I should have a fucking iPad if I want one.
So I went over to Best Buy, bought a 256 gig iPad Mini and one of those little covers for it, splurged on AppleCare, and handed it to my wife, who’d been scratching her head as to what to get me for Christmas.
Then we crammed our car full of stuff to the point you couldn’t get another toothpick into the trunk, heading to Houston, where I promptly got sick with a sinus infection.
Side note: As we drove into Houston around 8pm, we passed untold car dealerships with untold acres of cars on the lots, with untold measuring units of electricity keeping those lots lit like the surface of the sun on a cloudless day. So is my ownership of the iPad wasteful? I don’t even care. When they shut down those lights call me back on this.
This is the first time since the start of the pandemic that I’ve been sick. Right at the start of the pandemic I had a sinus infection, and I have not been sick since then. Until now. So that’s a pretty good run.
I spent Christmas Eve day and evening in bed, with a 101.6 fever. Finally took some meds around 8pm and got the fever down. Felt better today (Christmas Day), but still have had a bit of fever off and on. Going to the NextCare Urgent Care in the morning to get checked out and see if I can get some antibiotics. Sinus infections and me have a long history. I know the drill.
Being sick away from home sucks. Being sick as a guest in a house where the extra beds all feel like concrete slabs does not, in fact, make it better. It is hard to sleep, even after taking Benadryl, when you wake up because the bed is killing you. Oh well, another day and I’ll be home to our super-luxurious bed with actual springs in it.
Between sleeping, laying around being semi-miserable, and reading today, I’ve been setting up the iPad.
NO ONE does a smoother job of welcoming you back into their ecosystem than Apple. I am typing this on my MacBook Pro. I have an iPhone SE and an old 16gig iPad Air I inherited from my mom that is basically useless. I turned on the new iPad Mini, held my phone up to it, and the damned things talked to each other. A meaningful conversation in which the phone gave the iPad all the information it needed to set itself up. No fuss. No cursing. So, so good. I swear if I had to use a PC and/or Android I’d just quit technology completely. Actually I’d go Linux.
The new iPad Mini has ZERO social media installed on it. NONE. It is for specific purpose, and spying on me for FB is not one of them. I understand that Apple will spy on me. That’s not the hill I’m going to die on. I also told Apple Intelligence to FUCK OFF during the setup process. AI is bullshit. Outside a few very controlled uses it is probably the worst thing to happen to tech since social media. Now, if they can use it to cure cancer, that’s cool. I’m talking about people using AI to “create blog content” or to “come up with better ways to write a sentence or convey and idea.” Sorry folks – there are SUPPOSED to be good writers and shitty writers. If you are a shitty writer, you get better by learning to write better, not by farming out the work to AI. That is the hill I’ll die on, or at least lay down uncomfortably for an extended time.
Overall, even with the sinus infection and torture-bed, it has been a good Christmas. We are with our family for the first time in several years and it all went well. Our dog Riley is with us, and he’s been a good boy. Everyone falls in love with him. Lefty (our cat) is at home and I can’t wait to see him again. Best of all, other than me, everyone is healthy. There was a time a few years ago that wasn’t the case.
I’ve made some progress using Jekyll to create a static-page test version of this site. Just making some test pages and trying to see how it will work.
I’ve got a few things to figure out still. For example, the RSS feed is doing some weird stuff, but I found some info that I think will fix it.
One of the disadvantages of the static site generator is that it pretty much lives on one computer. It creates the pages and updates everything, saving to a folder on the computer, which you then upload oldschool-style to your server. So this means I can’t just jump into the post editor from whatever computer with an internet connection I happen to be using.
Like a lot of people, I think I’ve gotten used to the convenience of being able to access and edit documents and projects from nearly anywhere. Google Drive, stuff on iCloud, Dropbox, whatever. It’s all super convenient.
So why am I obsessed with this step back 20 years? I think there is a certain amount of nostalgia involved, for sure. There’s also an element of control. Much less worry about people hacking the static site and stuff like that. I like the community of people I’ve found who are into this kind of thing as well (https://indieweb.org/)
Also, I was in a conversation with an internet-friend the other day on micro.blog about how punk rock it feels to have a blog. I agree, and I have a lot to say about that, and sometime in the next month or so I will likely write a long post about it.
I’ve been doing nerd things.
I’ve been playing around with a static site generator called Jekyll.
What is a static site generator, you might ask?
Well, if you created web pages/sites in the old days, you likely wrote every one by hand. That HTML file contained the whole page, with links to images or whatever. There was no database backend, no embedded javascript, etc. If you were really fancy and smart (like me!), you used Server Side Includes to standardize your header and footer, so you’d only need to change it in one place if you wanted it to change across your whole site.
Flash forward to the late 2000s/early 2010s, and platforms like WordPress, Blogger, etc came about. They use more sophisticated means to deliver webpage. There are databases involved, lots of code and other shit. It’s all very cool. This site runs on WordPress.
You also have to update your site’s content management system (in this case WordPress) pretty often, as hackers and scumbags are constantly trying to log into it, hack it, steal your information, blah blah blah. All that complexity-based convenience comes with a price.
Another price – in theory these content management systems are kinda slower serving up pages, since they are doing a lot more on the backend.
BUT — these days there are number of programs like Jekyll that generate static pages for you, which you then upload to your space on a server (just like in days-of-yore). Since the pages are just HTML, some CSS, and whatever media you might embed in them, they are less vulnerable to hacking.
Also in theory, all else being equal, since there are not database calls involve and other technical fuckery, the static site should serve up to readers much faster (again – depending on connections speeds, etc., which is true for CMSs too).
The drawback?
You have to work harder setting it all up. You have to understand some stuff like installing things from the command line/terminal/whatever. It is all a lot nerdier than just going a Blogger or WordPress site.
Clearly I have too much time on my hands (I don’t).
So here is test.concretelunch.info. Since I’m just figuring this out, the homepage is still a level down in the directories, but whatever. You get the idea. There is supposed to be a process for moving a WordPress blog over “easily” (it is never easy). We’ll see ….
Other than the reelection of the orange turd, it has been a pretty good year. We’ve done some fun things this year. I suppose in a couple of days, when I’m not so tired, I’ll list all the concerts/shows we went to see. We have a lot lined up for 2025 as well, to which we look forward.
The second half of 2024 my reading habit kinda fell apart. We started a new D&D campaign that I am running, so I’ve been putting a lot of my reading time into that. Still, I will finish the year with 14 or 15 books read. Not too horrible when measured against the average inhabitant of The America.
Last weekend I earned my Nidan (2nd degree black belt) in Aikido. I’ve been practicing now for 18 years. I also turned 60 this year. I feel pretty good. Aikido is really good.
Our sweet dog, Riley, is now two years old, and just ridiculously sweet. Or 15-year old cat and my best boy Lefty is show no signs of slowing down other than that he’s getting to be a skinny old man.
Back in the summer I judges a freestyle skateboarding contest out in Lake Forest, California. The U.S. Opens. It was fun. A really good event, and clearly the judging was perfect.
I got to some good skateboarding in this year. Not as much as in some previous years, but still good. I’ve made real efforts to evaluate the way I use my time. I don’t really want to “practice” for contest level skating anymore. I just want to skate.
This blog is now about 18 years old. It is approaching 1000 posts. As I’ve written I am kinda tired of using WordPress for some reason. I mean, it works, but I’m bored with it. I’ve been doing some experimenting and learning with static site generators. If I can find a way to successfully export this blog’s content to a static site, I may change it. If not, well, I’ll just keep typing here.
A couple of years ago I did discover micro.blog, a very cool platform for really pure blogging. I love it. I have two blogs there (well, two main ones). bloftin2.blog – a skateboarding blog, and bloftin2speaks.micro.blog, which is kinda like this blog. So I’ve been posting a lot over there. I highly recommend micro.blog as a platform. It has nice, simple themes, is hand-built by an old coworker of mine who constantly improves it, and makes podcasting very, very easy.
As part of this blogging journey I’ve been doing a lot of reading and learning about IndieWeb principles and goals and Fediverse stuff. This has all been very reinvigorating. The web, thanks to social media, influencers, AI, scammers, spammers, scumbags, and douchbags has felt — NOT THAT FUN for a while All this stuff I’ve been digging on has brought back the excitement of the early web. It’s fucking cool.
I guess I’ll write about goals for 2025 soon.