3.0 - a brief retrospective

the motive

recently, i went to chicago to see a few close friends and loved ones! on the last day, while i was walking around downtown with them and sightseeing, i was compelled to just... take out my phone and start writing whatever came to mind. to me, it feels like... the comforting idea of creating, no matter how good or bad you think the output is, as much as you can... boosted up to 11. just... live-blogging to myself, basically, about what was happening in the moment--just so i wouldn't forget--every moment.

while i'm sure posting every single thing about my life on toni.zone would get grating quickly, i've been spending the last two years trying to properly get into writing and journaling to what i'd call... wavering success! over the latter half of 2023, i wrote a whole journal full of decently-daily entries. the problem was... i really wanted to keep it all private. it was more of a diary than anything; i had quite a lot to process back then and i couldn't bear to publicize a lot of it!

since getting on some medications and making some small life changes, though, i've been feeling considerably better! writing random stuff when i had free time during the chicago trip made me realize that i'm a bit more inclined to show people what i'm writing about these days. and i realized... if i really want to obscure what i'm thinking, that's what poetry is for! hence, the new poetry section. i mean, i've been writing songs for years, and it's now become much easier for me to distinguish between ideas that want to become poems and ideas that want to become songs.

thus, if i'm paying so much money for a website already, i thought to myself upon landing back at home that i might as well be using it for that, considering i'm doing so much better now. i've gone into great detail in the past about how i don't like using twitter, but that dislike has evolved into a disdain for the culture surrounding social media entirely.

of course i considered getting tumblr a bajillion times in the process of making this website. i just... never found a good enough reason to use it in lieu of this lovely little internet nook--entirely detached from any mullenwegs or musks--that could serve both as a test of my programming skills and a super-streamlined creative outlet! no, i didn't even switch to tumblr even when i wanted to blow my brains out wading through the jungle of ubuntu forward slashes and windows backslashes... and no, i didn't switch to wordpress either. this site is 100% mullenweg-free!

anyway. yeah, i completely overhauled the site and made my own ubuntu web server because github pages took too long to deploy changes. i'm trying to run a blog here, i can't keep waiting two minutes for a post to start existing before i can send the link to it! also, i really don't want posting content to be something tracked by version control. github is fantastic, but certainly not for that. so, how did it go? that's where the brief retrospective finally starts!

the process

i'm gonna be honest: i have never used node.js until this week... but it's magnificent. i decided the most effective way--mind you, not the easiest--to turn my creative output into a simple folder in the way i wanted to was to write my own backend surrounding that prospective folder. and doing that in a controlled local environment on my computer was easy enough! there were a couple frustrations, but node.js and express.js were both pretty intuitive and easy to learn. honestly, it was a lot easier and less frustrating than using jekyll, which is great for things like company websites and blogs that are updated occasionally, but not great for me at all.

the trouble started when i was looking for a vps (virtual private server) to host this little backend application of mine on... and found out how expensive they were. i will admit, it took me a while to be able to justify the price tag of a 2-year vps subscription to myself, but i ended up doing so relatively quickly! after screwing around for a while with almalinux and control panels, i got really bored living within the shackles of someone else's draconian landscape of nondescript buttons and dials and installed ubuntu instead.

my next battles were fought against various random express.js bugs, wayward ssl certificate creation quirks, and the random differences between ubuntu and windows file systems (as i previously mentioned.) lots of log-reading and trial-and-error later, i had a working website! on... the wrong domain.

wiping the dust off the toni.zone domain and getting rid of any residual connections that didn't have to do with the web server i bought took a little longer than i'd hoped, too. it certainly took longer than a couple hours i'd initially thought it would! but... now i'm here. posts are so much easier to make now, and i feel simultaneously like i'm finally at the destination i set out for and like my journey has only just begun.

god, that is fucking cheesy. reminder that i didn't use any generative ai throughout the span of this entire overhaul. that cheese--and all the other cheese holding this website together--is extracted from my brain and mine alone. and i hope that doesn't come off as, like... "if you use chatgpt, fuck you." i don't exactly attach morality to any of it. just... it seems like it'd be a bit problematic in the long run for me to listen to advice about something as complicated as this endeavor from a neural net robot with so little logical aptitude that it tries to capture its own king when it plays chess.

don't expect most of the posts to be as long as this. i just had to vent about the odyssey of remaking this entire website for a little while. making all my posts this long might be... counterintuitive to the point of this website being an outlet for my music, art, games, and minecraft stuff. ranked lists coming soon though! love you, internauts! ♥