Site News

I've been talking about rewriting this site since at least 2019, and I finally got around to it. What you're looking at is no longer WordPress; it's a .NET 10 Blazor application I wrote from scratch, sitting on Postgres, running in Docker behind nginx. I said back then that I might redo it in Laravel if I ever found the motivation, but I write C# all day at work, so Blazor made a lot more sense than writing in PHP.

I also moved the site to a more powerful VPS over at OVH, which gives me a lot more wiggle room to run Minecraft servers and whatever else I feel like hosting.

There's a new developer tools section as well, and a light and dark theme selector. I also built the traffic stats directly into the site instead of relying on Google Analytics.

I'm going to try to write some new tutorials and put up some better snippets. Anyway, hopefully this isn't my only post this year and I can get some more updates out.

I decided to look around for a more affordable VPS providers with better specs for the money, and found Hetzner. Now I’ve gone from a 2 core, 2 GB, 40 GB instance to a 4 core, 8 GB, 160 GB server for a little more than I’m paying now at DigitalOcean. I’m hoping this new service won’t let me down. I was also kind of disappointed with DigitalOcean, they don’t have the type of droplet I originally had for $12.

In other news I’ve been doing a little bit more web development in my spare time, so that motivated me to possibly start working on my personal website again. I’ve also finally started looking into container technology like docker. I’m not sure what I want to containerize, but I’m sure I’ll find a project.

It’s almost a running joke at this point, but I’m still alive! COVID hasn’t killed me yet, and we haven’t been plunged into a nuclear winter; so yay!

I have no idea what I’m doing with this site, other than keeping it up as beacon of hope that I may one day find the motivation and willpower to upload some monumental project that will change the world. I did upgrade the server to the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, as well as the latest version of WordPress. I’m hoping I can at least update some things, and post some new content; but as you know I’ve made that promise many times over the past 15 years. I can’t say it’s for the lack of time, because I have plenty of time after work.

Anyway, I hope everyone else is doing great, and if you’re still checking up on this site from time to time I thank you.

I’m not sure how many people follow my GitHub, but I’ve been learning React and Angular. So far if I had to pick a favorite it would be Angular, I prefer it’s stricter separation of code and markup, and it’s bigger collection of functionality that’s built in. I’ve got another domain (garbagefile.io), that I’ve wanted to do something with for a while, so I’m thinking I’ll build something in Angular and host it on there. My main site will stick with WordPress for right now, unless I get the motivation to rewrite it in Laravel or some other PHP framework.

I’m also working on a new version of my AIM server in .NET Core that should be a lot more scalable and feature rich. I’ve wanted to build it for years now, but I didn’t feel as though I had the skills or the technology stack to do it successfully. My goal would be to have it support up to 5000 connected users at once starting off, and to have it possibly scale up to 500,000 users (highly unlikely to ever get that amount, but I can dream can’t I?). Other goals include having it support AIM 1.x – AIM 5.x, as well as possibly creating plug-ins for those versions to support OSCAR over SSL, and stronger password hashing methods such as Scrypt or BCrypt.

Anyway, I hope to update this site soon with more updates, but if not, I guess i’ll see you next year!

I am still alive, and I’ve made a slight update to the About page. I plan to start working on more modern technical projects in the near future. Most of my more recent developments will be posted to GitHub before they get posted on this website.

I recently got a new job at a consulting company writing .NET code full-time, so my creative spark is starting to return.