brhfl.com

Haven’t done a meta post since August, so now seems like as good of a time as any to discuss a few things going on behind the scenes at brhfl dot com. For starters, back in November, I updated my About page. It was something I forced myself to write when I launched this pink blog, and it was… pretty strained writing. I think it reads a bit more naturally and in my voice now, and also better reflects what I’m actually writing about in this space. I also published my (p)review of Americana in November, which was an important thing to write. Unfortunately, it coincided with Font Library, the host of the fonts I use here, being down. This made me realize that I rely on quite a few free and/or open source products, and that I should probably round up ways to support them all. I’ll get to that at the end of this post, it’s a thought process that started in November, though.

Some time in October, I think, Hugo stopped working for me. For whatever absurd reason, the Hugo team has abandoned traditional package managers for Snapcraft. Snapcraft forces updates. I haven’t figured out exactly what is broken yet, but version 0.47.1 is the last version working for me. I have other projects I was hoping to get out this year built on Hugo, but I can’t safely do that until I solve this problem. This has no outside effect (I have safely tucked away a binary of 0.47.1), but it is extremely frustrating. I imagine the next meta post will be figuring out the fix.

I have moved brhfl dot com’s email provider from Google to ProtonMail. If you wish to send comments via the comment links, they’ll go to an encrypted Proton box now. It’s a more secure and private system, and moving this (as well as my personal address) also moves me one step further from Google in general.

During the 2nd iteration of my blog (the white blog, now at archive.brhfl.com), I created a matching Tumblr which just showcased some of the photography from my Flickr. I haven’t done anything with it in years anyway, and given Tumblr’s recent and frightening decision to ban porn, I am planning to delete it. I’m currently questioning whether there’s any value in archiving it; I suspect not.

I think that’s about it as far as recent/upcoming changes, so back to a handful of projects that keep the pink gears turning over here…

• Hugo is the software I use to generate this site. Go devs can contribute to the code.
• Font Library, again, hosts the fonts that I use here. Their biggest need seems to be translators, and of course font submissions.
• Unison is a bidirectional sync tool that runs on pretty much any OS. I use it to keep complete copies of my sites synchronized across several machines, and to sync the generated site with my host. They have a PayPal donation button on their site, which I can’t seem to reliably scrape a link to.
• It should be obvious by now that I write everything in Vim, and Bram, the author, really just wants people to donate to children in Uganda.
• I check server logs using GoAccess, and they mostly seem concerned with getting users to contribute issues.