Blog Update (3)

So, a new blog!

I've grown to dislike the old blog format a bit, the one on gabbott.dev, and so I decided to change it up a fair bit.

Scripts

The old website was a combination of shell, Ruby and Zig scripts. It was not particularly well made, and ended up being very inefficient. In fact, after the latest changes I made to the blog index page, it ended up taking about 15s to build the site. That's too much.

So, I've rewritten the full thing in Ruby. I wrote it... mostly by hand but used Claude for essentially looking up docs and some of the regex code, etc. One (quite important) function has been fully written by Claude until I get around to re-writing it, because it doesn't do the full job I need it to.

Still, whilst a lot of more work needs to go into the new site, it's functional now, so I'm going to replace the old one with this. As such, gabbott.dev is going to die a death, and gabbott.blog is born.

Domains

I didn't really like the .dev TLD, so I've changed it to .blog instead. I quite like gabbott.blog as a domain and it's more representative of what the site actually is: a blog.

I've also registered gabbott.uk which I'll use for more professional purposes as and when.

Yaz format

The KMD (Kinda Markdown) format I used to use is being replaced with a new format I'm calling Yaz (Turkish for summer) which is broadly similar but has some changes for a bit of QOL, and particularly to make the header contain more useful information that bloggy purposes.

CSS

There's new CSS, the nav element is now at the side instead of the top (which I prefer) and the font has been changed to Andika (which I quite like).

It's also switched to a dark theme that borrows some colours from the citruszest theme. It's quite nice in my opinion!

Yet to do...

I've still got the RSS to sort out, a few small elements like the sidebar formatting, the indexes for the tag pages, the rest of the slashpages, the logic for the Yaz to HTML code needs more work, etc.

I also want to look at getting a page set up that accepts PUSH requests so I can write blog posts on my phone etc. and away from the computer. I also need to get the site building logic to go on the server, again for the same reason. I can make that change fairly quickly though.

I'll look at building an Android app for writing blogs on the phone - it will be nice venture into writing Kotlin, which I've never tried before. I'll also write Ruby scripts to make it better. But it's up and running at least.