Meta on Tom Webster

New Site! Again!

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Well.. the old new site didn’t last as long as I thought it would. The core intention of using a platform I couldn’t control, somewhat worked. I did write more, I did post more. Notion also gave me a limited palette to work with, which was extremely helpful when designing how the content-flow would work. Editing from my phone and making drafts was great. Notion databases are still pretty damn great and very versatile.

But… I ran into limitations, and Notion has a pretty decent API… When I wanted to add RSS to my Notion site, I could. So the “lack of tinkering” objective started to fall apart. I could fix limitations, so I did. So, I was still doing the work, but on someone else’s platform that is not cheap. As of this writing, having a custom domain on a Notion site costs $96USD/year.

Combine that with my push to move more of my web services to self-hosted ones, going back to building my own site was easy enough to fall back into. This time I chose Hugo. Go is my main language and I’ve used Hugo in smaller projects before. So far, I like it. I took the time to develop my own theme using PicoCSS and modeled it after how the Notion site looked and worked.

So far, I like it. The extremely-simple HTML+CSS keeps the site fast. I don’t need any fancy JS with all the pre-processing Hugo enables. I added a ton of parameters and taxonomies to help keep the site oragnized. Its not quite as flexible as a Notion database, but Hugo’s Taxonomy system is pretty flexible. Currently, you can filter by licenses, tags, or content type (like blog posts), projects, or game clips). I’d like to eventually dig into how I could combine taxonomies so people could make hyper-specific filters, but that’s a project for another day.

One thing I did get for free was RSS support everywhere. Want an RSS feed for just projects? Sure. What about an RSS feed just for my 3D design? Yep, right here. Maybe you’re broken in the same way I am and just love Public Domain. Yeah, there’s an RSS feed for that. Its seriously cool. Great for readers who only want specific things for me, and also pretty good for those who want to see everything I do. I configured the RSS feeds to have full articles, no click-throughs required here. Use this site how you want. Let me know if I can make it better.

Powering the site is my tried-and-true Wireguard Backhaul, connected back to an nginx container that gets built by self-hosted Gitea Actions. Updates to my site are a git push away. It limits what I can do away from my computer, but I hardly ever wrote full posts on my phone, so this seems like a fine tradeoff.

I hope the content organization I’ve designed with Hugo is flexible-enough to last and less-brittle than my aging Jekyll site was. Only time will tell.

So.. One this is missing here, right? Where’s the source, Tom? Well… I’m not publishing it. At least, not like this, and not right now. Its not that I’m embarrassed by the code. Its kinda trash in places, but that’s fine, people know my code can be a trainwreck. Its actually because I really want to use the git repo for in-progress posts, notes, and private-drafts. Putting all that out there would force me to store drafts somewhere outside the repo, or not push them anywhere. Those two things would greatly hurt the workflow I’ve built up. I have so many half-written posts in Notion, and its fine because they’re just for me. I can include dumb questions, notes to myself, references to old memories that drive the themes in my writing, and I don’t really want any of that “on the record”. I want a distinct line between “my thoughts” and “my publications”. Thoughts are messy, I want to at least try to clean up my nonsense before putting it out into the world.

So.. No code. At least not right now. I’ll likely publish the site without any content one day in case someone wants to see how its built. It will be permissively-licensed like most of my other projects.

So, lets see if I can keep up occasional writing and project releases. At the very least, the site is much faster and more searchable. If you see any bugs or typos and want to do me a favor hit me up on Bluesky.

Why are all the publish dates 'wrong'?

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0600

If you’ve been following this site and/or my posts on BlueSky, you’ve probably seen projects pop up with weird dates. The best example is my Door Handle Slammer Stopper - My Stupidest Useful 3D Print posted on 2024-11-20, but with a publish date of 2024-03-05, what’s up with that?

I’d like to treat this site as part-blog/part-portfolio. For the Slammer Stopper, I finalized the design in March, but didn’t write or post about it publicly until a couple days ago. Because I view my projects as portfolio artifacts, I’d like to keep the dates accurate to when they were actually completed. It gives me (and readers) a more-accurate timeline of what I’ve worked on and when.

I’ve played around with adding separating “publish date” and “project date”, but this adds a lot of confusion around what means what to readers and around how I should the posts. In the end, I’ve decided that its fine to “lose” the data as to when the article was published, because it has pretty limited value. The real value is the timeline and content itself.

New Site!

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve moved my personal website to Notion.

For a while, I’ve been struggling to figure out what to do with my site. I always wanted it to be part blog, part project portfolio, part technical resource, but I kept running into distractions to make any kind of content-flow sustainable. I was always finding something to fix, something to optimize, something to build. For a person like me, this is simply too alluring to ignore:

Of course I could buckle down and write that guide for my new open source project, but it’ll look bad next to this janky menu system. Also, my analytics system is kinda busted, I should re-visit that, also the underlying server could use some workflow updates…

And it would just go on.. and on… and on!

I never ended up writing much because I was too “busy” fiddling around. While there is benefit in just playing around and exploring various aspects of tech, it wasn’t solving my core need: Be a place where I can write and publish. Working on the writing platform was too tempting, especially compared to the “less fun” aspects, like, you know, actually writing things down.

So, I’m trying out Notion.

At some point I need to write up a more in-depth review of Notion, but for now, here’s the pitch/justification: Hosting my site on Notion removes (most of) the temptations around fiddling with the site-tech itself. Notion should be just-extendable-enough to power my site, get it organized roughly the way I want, and get out of the way. It should allow me to focus more on actually putting stuff out there and less on the systems around that content delivery.

Will it actually work out that way? Who knows?! But its interesting enough to be worth the try. So that’s why the site looks different (although showing anything other than an SSL error from a server that was ignored for far too long is better).