THE NIN HOTLINE

Thursday August 31, 2023

Fitting in my new skin, just tell me what to do

Meta-update! This website has a new look and feel on the homepage, and I spent time over the last few weeks creating a pretty good collection of homepage covers and tabletops for the covers to sit on, which I'll be cycling out manually with some regularity, until either I or some AI code assistant come up with a clever way to automate the scheduled release of new "covers" for this old blog.

Little things you might not notice if I didn't point them out:

  • The website cover art is different depending on the device you're viewing.
  • This website is a PWA - this means it's designed to be stupid fast, and on certain devices, you can install it on your homescreen, which gives you kind of an out-of-browser experience. This also hints that my day job is in ecommerce.
  • I turned off analytics years ago. My opinions about online stuff have shifted a lot - I'm glad you're here, but I don't need to know how often you visit or what your favorite pages are, I'd rather the site be FAST
  • The archives are up for revamping next! At the moment, you can only access the site archives by using our Site Search - which is fully operational again. But sometimes you just want to browse, and though I've had an idea of how to approach that for a while, it's only been with recent advances in public AI tooling that I've felt motivated enough to execute on that vision.
  • This website will outlast all the social networks, but that doesn't mean I'm going to ignore them. So I've got accounts on Bluesky, on Threads, on Instagram, and even on Facebook. I'm a bit of a masochist, and I don't believe that syndicating the same content everywhere is interesting, so you'll see they're all different. I don't know which one will win this round, but it's not Mastodon (which I do like), sorry.
  • Somehow, the RSS feed here still works - although by announcing that, I surely will have broken it within a month's time.
  • Lastly: 2024 is going to be a year of giveaways - and maybe an art project or two. Probably all done through the website, with later announcements on social media. I plan on deaccessioning some interesting stuff - stay tuned.

In a testament to my marketing prowess, I will press the "Publish" button on this page at 1:35am on a school night. One of the downsides to running a static site generator built in 1999-era Perl is that I can't be bothered building out modern content management tooling like, oh, scheduling. But you found your way here, and that's what matters.