Status Update

I haven’t posted much recently, so I thought I’d make a status update of sorts. I’ve been so focused on coursework, getting addicted to Destiny 2, and migrating to Windows 11 as a daily driver (I know, the heresy) that I forgot I even hosted things at home.

Administrative Stuff

Since I last posted, I temporarily removed the public repository from tildegit. While it’s a good place, they have rules about sensitive content, and since I wrote that one definitely kink story before, I took it down to comply with those rules preemptively. I still keep the site in the same git repository, and it’s on both my desktop and the Pi hosting this, so the commit history isn’t lost by any means. I’m still searching for a gitea/gitlab instance to put that up there. That is, if it’s even a good idea security-wise to have it public given copycat attacks would be simple enough to pull off.

I also changed my Twitter handle from @cdmnky to @sierrashark, as I’ve been slowly rotating away from that old handle just because nobody knows how to say it. It won’t disappear entirely since a lot of sites don’t let you change usernames cough Mastodon cough so I hope this domain won’t lose its backstory.

Personal Stuff

I’m about to do final exams for this semester which means only one semester left before I get my degree. It’s been a long road, and I sure as hell didn’t anticipate a pandemic happening my Junior year to throw my life out of whack, but once it’s over, hopefully I have some work somewhere. Ideally I’ll be moving, which means I’ll have to figure out where I can host this site. It shouldn’t be too difficult to move it to a proper hosting service after all, but there may come a time when there will be extended downtime as I move cross-country. My job search has just begun in a way, not in earnest, but I’m poking some listings saying they’re starting in the summer for info. I still have no idea where I’ll end up but I’m hoping I’m closer to my partners, ideally in their city, but we’ll see.

My final semester will mostly consist of my senior project, and my courseload outside of that will only be 3 classes: a data visualization course, applied combinatorics, and a creative writing gen ed. I’m just glad to finally start my actual life soon.

The Heavy Stuff

Now I’m going to talk about Gopher. I like Gopher, how simple it is to set up, how straightforward it is to write a Gopher page, and how neat and tidy it is with plaintext. However, it’s time I admit something. While I started on Gopher, it’s pretty much useless to me now. I want to share my writing and blog posts and such to people. With static site generators, once it’s set up, I can write stuff as easily as I could for Gopher, and actually share a link to someone who can open it perfectly fine on just about everything. I get the appeal for Gopher and Gemini and I would love to be able to continue making content for that part of the internet, but it’s redundant. Only the same dozen or so people actually read stuff there, and while, let’s face it, only a few people read my posts on the web too, the people I’d like to read my stuff only did when I linked to a web proxy. It’s time I said goodbye to that space. I’ll keep it up as long as I can but I won’t be adding anything new, except for probably an announcement or something.

To the die-hard Gopher people who are disappointed by this, I’m sorry, but I just haven’t been engaged with that community since the pandemic hit. I never browse posts there anymore, it’s just too clunky opening up a terminal. Sure, there’s RSS feeds and such but that’s mostly mirroring and half-defeats the purpose of using Gopher in general.

All things must come to an end, perhaps even this web blog at some point, but I can’t deny Gopher’s impact in my online presence and the places I’ve been.