I just realised that this blog has existed for a year now!

Looking back, I’ve learned an awful lot. Originally I really just wanted to learn a bit more about Markdown as a language (this has helped me hugely using the notes tool Joplin, as well as discovering that Discord supports some markdown formatting) and learning how to use a static site generator.

I’ve actually really enjoyed learning Hugo and hacking different solutions with it. I’ve decided to run an introductory course on web development with it to Summer School students over the course of about 7 session. Not sure about the layout of the course yet, but I’m pretty excited about it.

The site serves a few different purposes for me - I’m using it as an online portfolio, but also as a form of documentation for some of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve definitely checked back on a few posts when I’ve needed to remember something.

The Future

I’m not sure of everything I want to do with this site, but I’ll definitely be expanding it. The speed and ease of hosting static sites is really impressive compared to setting up things like WordPress.

Some ideas;

  • Get Webmentions integrated so I can use the site socially. The problem with this is that I would likely have to fundamentally change how the site is hosted so that the mentions don’t only get generated when I build the site after a new post. I’m interested in using GitHub with my Summer School students so perhaps it’ll be a learning opportunity for me.
  • Try to incorporate Mastodon more into the blog - it would be great if I could get posts syndicated with my Mastodon instance.
  • Potentially consider moving my teaching website here. At the moment it’s hosted on Google sites (boo!) via my work account. I have a LOT of resources stored in Google drive on the backend and my students access these regularly. It will be tough to transition away from Google completely for work, but at least considering the other possibilities out there is a good first step.
  • Integrating Search into the blog. No idea how that would would at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to look into.

Here’s to another year!