It’s been a couple of nice hobby web site weekends here are Pretty Good Hat PNW. Reading Adam’s great writeup of setting up an IRC server put me in the mood to play around with servers, and with the price of my shared hosting having gone up last year, I thought I’d experiment with setting up some servers at Hetzner.

Well, one good thing led to another, and curling was on TV so I had a lot of good laptop time, and so I’m finishing out this weekend having completely migrated from my prior host after more than ten years there. I learned a bunch about setting up new servers! I can’t say enough good things about Adam’s guide and the encouragement to be found hanging around the omg.lol community.¹

Before cancelling my old service, I made an exhaustive scroll through all the content in that home directory, downloading and archiving a lot. Over the years I’ve had everything from twenty years of web sites², to old versions of my CV, to little R experiments, ruby projects, and other things that kind of scaffolded a lot of my history. It really is true that a good chunk of the story of my life is the story of all the things I’ve done with web sites in that time. It’s a very specific kind of time capsule, those directories full of web projects, jpegs, and datestamps.

misc tools & process notes

• I used Zed for a lot of my migration work. Its remote editing via an ssh connection works beautifully (and in fact is how I’m writing this post).
• Caddy is great! The way it enables automatic certificate installation is so seamless.
• I post with a Drafts action and a cross-platform shortcut for uploading images, both of which hit a little PHP micropub endpoint. It’s really pretty cool that with updates of authentication, I could move my posting tools over to a new host and just … keep using them.
• web sites and servers are cool and fun to play with

Sometimes one does get the urge to change web hosts and screw around with servers for a couple of weekends.

I’m continuing to use Helix and I really appreciated this quick overview from Felix Knorr, who provides a few new nice configuration options (including binding the immediate favorite gw command to a single key). I remain really happy with how ready-to-go this editor is without plugins or heavy-duty configuration, while still being discoverable and offering a lot of depth.

This post from Julia Evans about using Helix was just the bump I needed to check it out, after installing it but never really giving it a try some time ago. I really like how quickly it’s immediately useful without much extra work or time. It will take some adjustment from vim navigation and commands, so perhaps won’t stick, but for now I’m appreciating the intentionality of thinking about what I need to do in the editor, and find so far that I’m picking it up pretty quickly.

For what it’s worth, the only additions I’ve made to Julia’s configuration so far are for some cursor differentiation and one hard-to-break vim convention:

"0" = "goto_line_start"

# from https://docs.helix-editor.com/configuration.html
[editor.cursor-shape]
insert = "bar"
normal = "block"
select = "underline"

It would be cool if Discord had a public client API so I could read through just a list of new posts in subscribed channels.

Huh. It would be cool if Discord was basically web forums with RSS. “Look at what they took from us etc.”

I’m having a great time using Journelly. It’s an org-mode based journaling tool built for iOS, which ticks some big nerd boxes for me. Journelly stamps metadata into the header of each entry, like weather and location, and then the app nicely renders that info on display in the app. And creating new entries is as frictionless as making a new note in Drafts or another editor – but with the bonus of living in a tidy, appealing timeline that Álvaro Ramírez calls “tweeting, but for your eyes only.” (By comparison, most of my time-and-place notes that I put in Drafts never make it out of the inbox, not since my long-ago slow blog over at my tilde.) Since Journelly’s data is stored in org-mode, it’s interoperable with emacs (see nice write-ups and usage notes by Mike, Jack, and Ellane¹. Journelly’s developer also runs the new blog platform lmno and builds some other cool org-based tools.

Using the iPhone-based Journal app in recent iOS versions hasn’t stuck for me, despite being well-built and elegant, and of course it’s tightly integrated with the operating system. But I think I’m somewhat deterred by the fact that it only lives on the phone. I’m attracted to Journelly in part because it overcomes this limitation. I’m not doing it yet, but it’s easy to point the iOS app’s storage to an iCloud location and access it from anywhere you can run emacs, which opens up new ways to write and edit posts, but also to eventually publish or convert into a book or archive via Pandoc — so many possibilities.

Instant writing, with a powerful engine under the hood for a ton of flexibility, make Journelly a very neat little tool, one I’m happy to continue adventuring with.

This great dive into emacs by Matt Gemmell starts as so many emacs stories do, with a mostly-stranger saying, “Have you heard of org-mode?”

Ah, that’s better.

It must be winter vacation time, because I’m Screwing Around With My Roon Server Again.

Lowkey one of the best devices I’ve ever owned, my 10-year old Synology just keeps working, and Synology continues to keep it up to date and supported. It’s really impressive.