2025-01-11

Some short-term plans for the new year

I know I'm a couple days late again but happy new year! I've been tossing some ideas around in my head about stuff to change here.

Bog purpose

Originally, the Bog was meant to be for, quote, "updates or random thoughts", and I had the idea that I would make Tumblr textpost-like entries (this was back when all the posts went on the same page). Nowadays, it's mostly just updates, usually about the site. I'd like to write more about myself and what I'm up to, get my thoughts out there. It could even help be a source of motivation to make the most of my days.

So I'd like to establish a theme for the Bog, first of all: the Bog is for short-to-medium, less-than-formal writings about what's going on with me, my projects, and the site. Also including thoughts I've developed enough to be longer than a couple lines of text. If there's been changes in my life that I'm okay with sharing, I want to put them here. If I'm starting a thing or I've made significant progress on a thing and I feel really good about it, that goes here, too.

I still want to have a place to throw little bits of text into, with no regard for quality or organization, but that will be a different part of the site when I get around to it.

The drawing gallery/archive/feed

I'm not taking immediate action on it, but I've been a bit dissatisfied with the drawing gallery lately. For one, it's supposed to have all the older drawings from before the update, but I've made next to no effort to do that. I also don't like how every drawing has its own HTML page even when there's nothing on it except the image. Why not just have a link straight to the image at that point?

I've observed that the drawing gallery serves three main purposes:

Showing off stuff I'm proud of to newcomers (a gallery)
Sharing my latest drawings, doodle or high-effort, to people who check in regularly (a feed, sorta)
Letting people who are like me snoop through/download all my drawings from over the years (an archive)

I think it would work better if these were separated a bit more; a nice, spiffy gallery page or two, and then yearly archive pages with descriptions and perhaps thumbnails, that's what I'm thinking right now. I'd also like a place to quickly upload little scribbly doodads, too, but I'm still thinking that through.

More hosting?

I've been using Neocities for hosting for coming up on two years now, and I haven't had any problems with them, personally. I almost never use the social features, and I barely interact with the other people here, so neither of those have been a point of frustration. To me, this is pretty much just a free web host. The file type restrictions and the slowish, sometimes dysfunctional CLI tool are not ideal, but for me, not a dealbreaker.

That said, I still want to eventually move off here and not rely on free stuff forever. One of the ways I could do that is already in my own home: an anonymous benefactor of mine is hosting a website, and her hosting plan allows multiple sites to be hosted on it. So if I can get my hands on a domain, (read: ask her to buy it for me,) I can start hosting there. No storage or file restrictions, FTP uploading, email accounts, and all that.

The one worry I have is that the provider seems kinda sketchy. It's Resellers Panel, (owned by LiquidNet Ltd,) a web hosting resale program. They do appear to be a real, registered business according to my snooping, and they've been around a while, but it still seems like a deceptive practice. Still, if anyone reading this is familiar with them or with web hosting resale in general, my mailbox is wide open.

Not going to try to write a coherent sign-off, I've been trying to get this update pushed for days. Peace.

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