New blog, who dis?

If things look a little different around here, that’s because they are! The blog got a full rebuild this week, and it doesn’t live in the cloud anymore. It lives at home, right next to Plex and everything else.

Out with Hugo, in with Astro

The old site was built with Hugo and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. It worked fine, but it was just a pile of static pages that couldn’t show anything happening on the server.

The new one is built with Astro and runs on my own server. Same address, same 8-bit NES look (I wasn’t giving up the pixel art), and every old post is still at the same link. If you bookmarked something, it still works.

What’s new

Since the blog now sits right next to the rest of the lab, it can finally show what’s going on. The home page has three new panels:

• Now watching: what I’m watching on Plex right now, or what I watched last, with a sliding row of posters. Click the current poster to jump straight to it on Plex.
• Now listening: the audiobook I’m in the middle of, plus the last few I started or finished. How far along I am shows as a pixel health bar, because of course it does.
• Lab status: a little light for each service (Plex, Requests, Audiobooks, Comics and Rewind) that tells you if it’s up. Next time something breaks at midnight, you’ll know before you text me.

On a big screen the posts and Lab status sit on the left, with Now watching and Now listening on the right. On your phone it all stacks up like normal.

Other bits

• The Services page got a cleanup. The Plex link takes you straight to the Plex web app, the resume builder is gone, and there’s a new Rewind link (more on that soon…).
• Services links open in a new tab, so you don’t lose your place here.
• Long post titles in the post list wrap next to their dates instead of shoving them around.

Why bother?

Mostly because I could. But also because the old blog was the only part of my setup I couldn’t touch. Now it’s just another service on the server: backed up every night with everything else, watched by the same alarms, and quick to update. So expect posts a little more often than once every couple of years.

Game on!