2023 Recap
I’ve been blogging for three years now. Here’s a look back at what I did for 2023.
I only managed to write twelve posts this year (not counting this one). That’s less than half of 2022’s total of 30. Partly that’s due to all the technical work I’ve been doing. I haven’t abandoned this blog by any means. There’s two ways I can “work on my blog”. The first is by writing new content, and the second is technical work. I did a lot of technical work last year, but that means I didn’t have time to create a lot of new content
Technical Improvements
The biggest technical improvement is the conversion to Tailwind CSS. That’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time and I’m glad I got it done. The old blog theme was basically one of the default themes that came with Jekyll and it didn’t match the rest of the site. This new theme is… well, it’s not much of a theme, but it shouldn’t be too hard to add some nice styling bit by bit. I look at it as a fresh starting place.
The Tailwind system I integrated is nice and clean. I was able to get rid of several css files from the old theme, so the site should be more efficient and load faster.
Another big change was moving to Mastodon. I got rid of the Twitter links and set up a system to automatically post to Mastodon whenever I posted here on the blog. I actually had someone contact me with a couple suggestions, and I think they might be using my plugin on their own blog. It always feels nice to have someone find your work to be useful.
This year I also upgraded to Debian Bookworm. That gave me a chance to test out my Ansible migration system.
Gaming and Philosophy Posts
Keeping with the trend from previous years, about half my posts were on my gaming and self-improvement philosophies. I wrote about how you need to rest your communions skills as much as your wrists. Incremental improvement is an important focus, and sometimes trying to be less bad can be a good approach. Finally, I looked at how important hearing a coach’s voice can be for professional athletes, something I feel justifies Reiterate’s approach for esports.
Elon Musk
One of my most populat posts this year was the one where I explained why I’m leaving Twitter. I’m not sure how I feel about that. It didn’t exactly go viral, but it did get boosted and favorited on Mastodon, something that hasn’t happened with any of my other posts. For someone like myself who has basically no audience, it was startling to see complete strangers clicking that boost button.
That post is my rant-iest post yet, and I’m not exactly proud of that. It’s easy to get a reaction by being incindiary. That’s not something I want to be known for, though. I’m not going to take that post’s popularity as a sign that I should be more extreme in my views. Quite the opposite. This is a personal blog; it’s a place for me to expand on my own thoughts, and if other people want to follow along that’s fine. I can rant sometimes, but in the end I feel this palce is better off with more measured discourse.
Looking Forward
Reiterate is in a pretty good place right now. This year I upgraded it to use all the modern Swift concurrency affordances. It’s still written in AppKit, not SwiftUI, so I suppose that’s the last major upgrade it will need to be a fully “modern” app. Feature-wise, I’d say it’s complete. I use it every day in my own gameplay, and I think it’s useful.
I see more and more pieces with people asking Is League Dying?, usually followed by lots of statistics to make the case that it isn’t. But it all feels kind of forced. Reiterate is not tied to League. I use it for League, mostly, but there’s nothing in the app that says it can’t be used for any other game. So if League does retire, Reiterate can continue on in some other form. I’m not worried about that.
