Yep, it's a little later than usual, and I have to be honest, it's been a busy week with the school holidays starting — so we had to sort a lot of things and be places. That meant slow progress on everything.

Scribbles

Yesterday I looked at the server bill, because it was larger than I expected. That caused me to look at options, which brought me to the new Hetzner plans with a CX32. That's a saving of around 60% from my previous plan. There were some issues with bringing up custom domains, which is an issue I had the last time I upgraded — I'm trying to figure out what the issue is and I think it's Caddy or some process being bogged down. Sorry for any downtime (I hate downtime).

Shortly after the upgrade I wasn't happy with the speed of the sites and things did seem rather slow — so I looked at the Puma config and made changes here. Specifically I enabled the web concurrency setting and added a config of 4. And it's working super nicely now... I even think it's better than the more powerful server.

OK, enough technical stuff 😵‍💫

Earlier in the week I added the ability to add custom CSS to your blogs. If you're interested, here is Juha's blog with some custom CSS at work (it's still a work in progress — but it's awesome already). It's super simple and should work for most that are comfortable with working with CSS. There are some extra classes scattered across pages to help you target specific areas — you can see some of these here. Head on over to your blog settings and go to "Change Appearance".

I have been asked for adding more simple customisation for non-technical folks — that's going to come and I'll work on slowly adding some options over the course of the summer holidays.

I should add some proper blog posts explaining this...

Apart from that, and some bug fixes, that's all I had time for.

Shoutouts

Wait... what? Yes, shoutouts. Still going strong and working nicely. It's difficult for me to make too many changes here, although I have a few ideas that are still brewing in my mind.

The bigger thing I'd like to do here is to change the domain name. Don't worry, the old one still works of course, including all embeds.

Instead of using the .lol extension, I am moving shoutouts to .page instead and is now the default domain that I link to. Here it is: shoutouts.page.

You may notice that the CDN and Embed code now use this domain instead of .lol. So if you want to update your embed code, you're more than welcome to — not necessary though.

There are more things I need to do with the domain switch, like using the correct emails etc. Taking it slow though.

One day I'll redirect the .lol domain to .page — but that is still far off.

Using the .page domain should perhaps give you an idea what I'd like to do... one day 😋

Other stuff

That's all I had time for during the week. There was also some client work that I had to work through which I have to prioritise.

There were some issues with sending out emails from my custom domains, so some emails went out way later than they should have done — I did email everyone from my personal address though... so there might have been duplicate replies. Of note, I use ForwardEmail that I send from in HEY. It's pretty good and I am happy with my set up.

Now that the summer holidays have started I need to be a little bit wiser with my time and will allocate 4 hours each morning for work so that we can enjoy the afternoon out as a family.

Hoping to give Sublime Feed a nice push over the course of the next few weeks also.

These weeklogs have been interesting and gave me much greater focus on just my work and then reflect on it — it's different and, being honest, it's been a little bit hard because there is seemingly withdrawal symptoms from not "micro" posting on my blog. It's still a new way of doing things and I'm finding it hard. Hopefully another few weeks will settle this though and I look forward to when this is normal. I often find myself trying to look for stuff to do because I have the urge to write something small, but I stop myself.

Another problem (not really a problem) is the feedback loop (comments, likes, etc) — I think for me that's the biggest thing that I need to get used to (or the lack of). Although, I've been getting more email than usual and I love that. I love to write longer form and think about it more.

Anyway, let's see how it goes. The minimalist in me prefers this way. I actually look forward sitting down and focusing on these and reflecting back on what I have achieved.

Thanks for reading.

— Vincent