Journal Update 022

What’s New

In my last journal entry update back in September, I talked about rebranding away from nicksphere to just my name, nicholasjohnson. Well I’ve finished the rebranding. For more on that, see my previous journal entry. I accomplished it by the most straightforward way possible: setting up everything in parallel on a fresh server, then updating the domains. I changed some backend server stuff, but probably nobody cares about those details.

Using Ansible, I automated configurations that remain the same across servers I use. At some point in the future when it’s ready, I’ll git push the playbook. I decided not to automate the entire server. For every change I make on the server, I’d have to update the Ansible scripts, creating twice the work. It would only save me time in the scenario where my server is wiped and I need to reprovision it from scratch. That situation is very rare, so automating isn’t worth it.

My new VPS accepts many payment methods, so I don’t depend on digital tulips anymore. Unfortunately my VPS provider doesn’t have IPv6 support yet, but I’ve been assured that they already have the IPv6 addresses and they’re just working on assigning them now.

I decided to drop I2P support for the time being. It was broken anyways for who knows how long. If you want to know more about that, read this Git commit message. If you use the Tor onion to access this journal, nothing has changed. I migrated the onion to the new VPS as-is.

In the journal repository, I’ve started signing Git tags rather than commits. Git-annex has been removed for cleaner code and better accessibility on Sourcehut. The ugly Python code has been entirely removed and replaced with two Hugo configuration files, meaning Hugo properly generates my journal now all on its own. I switched from emojis to using emoji codes for better code accessibility.

Finally, I archived my old repos on Sourcehut. I didn’t want them completely gone since they’re linked to in some of my old entries and I try hard to avoid link rot, but I also didn’t want them so front and center since they’re poorly written.

Future Plans

For the Hugo theme for this journal, you can find my plans in this TODO file. I’m going to start versioning the theme. Once I implement the features in the TODO file, as long as nothing else occurs to me, I’ll make the first official release of the theme with version 1.0.0.

As for the journal itself, eliminating the promoted links page is the only major change I have planned and that will happen gradually.