Much like the vast majority of other blogs online, I guess I came to a bit of a halt with posting last year. This was largely because I didn’t really have many projects I felt I needed to document for posterity, although I fully upgraded my main server this past summer. I moved everything running on the server from LXC to Docker containers orchestrated through Docker Compose. This was mainly because I couldn’t seem to get networking set up on the new server with LXD/LXC and got pretty frustrated trying. I rebuilt basically everything in Docker…which turned out to be less of a hassle than I first thought. To be honest, I absolutely prefer the new setup - updating every container used to be a manual affair (although, to be fair, that was largely because I put off learning Ansible) that would take a good hour every week or two. I can now invoke docker-compose -f compose.yml pull and docker-compose -f compose.yml up -d and everything is updated in under a minute. Also, no more fixing borked upgrades (I’m looking at you Nextcloud) in LXC containers!

Anyhow, I’m not feeling particularly pressured over the lack of posting. This blog started mainly as an excuse for me to learn Hugo.

Killing Mastodon

I also decided to kill my Mastodon instance. This was for two reasons: 1. The install borked itself beyond my skills to repair. I hosted my instance on a Vultr server (as I documented in previously here) and installed it manually. However, successive upgrades clearly created some conflicts and the server was left unable to prune old data. I tried reinstalling various aspects of the server application, but nothing worked. I watched as the disk slowly filled until it finally crashed. I probably could have worked to extract my data (I might have tried this and had it fail on me), but the second reason for killing the server became apparent…I really didn’t care! It’s not that I didn’t find the people I followed particularly interesting (some definitely were and posted interesting ideas), it’s just that I found myself going weeks without opening the app at all. I’ve never really seen the point of sharing my location or mood…so I just let it sort of wither.

Social media has never really been my thing. I’m sure if people want to interact with my writing they can send me a Webmention (provided the Webmention server is still working- I haven’t checked in months!) or just email me. I’ll have to dig through my old posts to update the Hugo post archetypes to remove the syndicated stuff at the top of the page. I thought it was a clever hack at the time…maybe I’ll rejoin Mastodon at some point and reactivate it. I largely doubt it at the moment though.

Things people seem to actually be reading…

On the topic of my writing, I occasionally check the web analytics for my site. I use a self-hosted install of mMtomo for this and really am just interested if people read anything I’ve written. I’m not looking to ever turn this blog into a commercial endevour, so it’s really just out of curiosity that I check visitor numbers. What struck me is that two particular posts are far and away the most popular. The first is my guide on how to script remote Synology shutdowns and the other is how to import Broadlink IR devices into Home Assistant. I’m quite pleased as both of these are how-to guides- it feels great that some of what I’ve written might be useful to someone somewhere around the world. It also indicates that Synology should probably incorporate this feature…or maybe they have already, I wouldn’t actually know as I sold my Diskstation last month!