This is my first post from the first new computer, a MacBook Air M1, that I have bought personally since 2008, a Mac Pro. I've owned a flurry of work laptops MacBook Pro 15 inchers from 2013, 2015 and currently, a 2017, and I bought a 2010 Mac Pro a few years back. I haven't had my own personal laptop since 2013.

I finally updated to Jekyll 4 which was annoying as I had to upgrade pagination. I think I've finally hit a place where I've outgrown Jekyll for blogging software. There's some new static site generators that look a bit nicer, as I still write my posts by hand in HTML as if it were 1994. I can write HTML in my sleep (and probably have) but it detracts from writing. If there's any general weirdness on the blog, its due to the upgrade even if I'm still content with my hyper minimalist presentation.

Update: what a pain in the ass Jekyll is, the old parser for Markdown isn't supported, but the majority of my post are actually HTML. My previous parser literally spit out whatever was HTML content, whereas this one processes the HTML. This doesn't do anything besides actually cause a lot of problems if you have any HTML errors like a mission " or an improperly closed tag. Thus, a few pages were borked requiring me to go through and try and find the HTML misrenders. I think I got almost all of them but I think my days with Jekyll are coming to an end. I started this blog on Tumblr (mistake) and moved to something I could control in 2016 as it was clear not owning the platform I was on was a negative, and I completely misunderstood Tumblr by actually blogging on it. It in hindsight, it was absolutely the correct move as a closed platform meant I was subject to the whims of the owners, and even better, the hardened SEO has meant I've had much better SEO even if my SEO strategy is entirely anti-SEO beyond accessibility.

I've never gotten my FTP process to automate so I still use FileZilla and I write in HTML. Newer frameworks exist. Right now I'm leaning towards a React based system that renders a static site long as it can be used even when JS is disabled, adds very little in payload (my blog is insanely light weight with a payload 11k of CSS, 90k of JS (mostly jQuery, time to move on there) and roughly 10k of HTML for many posts.