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Shooting With 30-year-old Film

2025-07-10 00:00:00

First off hi! Oops! I haven't updated the blog in a hot minute! I won't make any excuses, I've just been real bad about keeping up with stuff in general, and the blog has taken a big mental backseat. I'd love to recount the past six months and what's new and everything but knowing myself and the way my brain works, that'll just increase my mental backlog and I'll be less likely to keep up with things here. So instead you get a half-hearted sorry and a new post today.

I first started shooting with film back in 2019. Well, technically I started in the late '90s-early '00s by borrowing and fucking around with my mom's camera, but never really did photography back then. But fast forward to a few months before the pandemic hit, and I had on a whim grabbed a used Pentax ME Super off of eBay for a decent price. I got familiar with it, shot a couple test rolls here and there, and had a good time. My parents, apparently wanting to encourage my hipster behavior, responded by gifting me my mom's old Nikon N6006 and a handful of rolls of film for my birthday the following year. Unfortunately, not too long after I got around to moving states, and the film and cameras got all packed away and never properly unboxed until over a year after I moved again and dug them out one day.

I ended up picking film back up recently, mostly thanks to the discovery that the camera store we have in walking distance from the house sells and develops film (hooray for me, sucks to be my wallet). It's taken a bit to get back into film, and I'm learning some harsh and pricey lessons in metering along the way, but I've also been having a lot of fun!

Anyway, back to those rolls of film I was gifted some years back. I pulled them out of storage too, and as I was taking inventory I noticed one I didn't recognize:

Gold Plus 100? I know Gold and ColorPlus, but not Gold Plus, and the only 100 ISO films Kodak makes that I could think of are Pro Image and Ektar. When in the world was this made?

After some research and asking the nerds on /r/AnalogCommunity, I learned that this stock is more or less the same as Kodak's current Gold line, they just dropped the "Plus" branding (and I guess the 100 ISO version?) back around the turn of the century. I couldn't for the life of me find a reliable source for when this particular roll would've been manufactured, but the general consensus was that it's probably at least 30 years old!

If you didn't know, film absolutely does have a shelf life; every roll of 35mm I've ever bought has had an expiration date about two years out from the date of purchase. How long it actually lasts can vary a lot depending on factors such as storage condition and the exact type of emulsion (black and white tends to hold up longer than color negative, which in turn lasts longer than slide film). You can keep it in good condition for longer by refrigerating it, and conversely letting it get too hot will kill it much faster. I had no idea how this particular roll had been stored for the past three decades, but was willing to bet my parents didn't have it in the freezer the whole time (and there was a half-decent chance it spent a while in the attic). So, without any reliable info, I fell back on general guidelines. That is, overexpose by one stop per ten years past expiration. There's no way of knowing exactly when it expired without the original box; assuming 30 years and fully abiding by that "rule" would mean shooting at ISO 12, which would be tough in even ideal outdoor weather. Since there was always the chance that the film was already toast anyway, I opted to strike a balance between light and the ability to actually shoot at reasonable shutter speeds. So I slapped it in the Nikon, set it to ISO 25, and went at it.

I took a couple test shots around town, and then shot the bulk of the roll while on a family trip to Nashville, TN. Definitely nothing too important since I knew I was taking a risk from the get-go. Even with mostly nice weather, I only occasionally was able to achieve shutter speeds faster than 1/60, so handheld shooting was a little rough at times, but I did my best. I made it through the roll, even got a couple extra exposures out of it, and upon returning home dropped it off at the lab, telling them I wasn't expecting much.

A week later, I picked up my negatives and a flash drive of scans and:

Yeesh, that's a little rough.

There was a massive green color shift across the entire roll, which is generally expected for long-expired film. I won't pretend that I grasp all the details, but my general understanding is that this just thanks to the red, green, and blue-sensitive emulsion layers decaying at different rates over time.

But hey, an image can still be made out, so this isn't unusable! Some basic level adjustments can prove to be a life (or at least photo) saver at times. Lightroom's auto-levels functionality didn't know what to do at all, but some manual adjustments got me something at least worthy of sharing with family/the entire internet:

The bigger issue is there's still some clear underexposure going on here, no doubt at least partly thanks to shooting 2 stops over instead of 3. Not much I can do about that, but I thankfully wasn't doing a ton of high-contrast shooting here anyway.

I picked out a small handful of other promising-looking shots and gave them the same treatment. No crazy editing on any of these, partly because all I have right now are meh-quality JPEG scans, partly because there's only so much you can do with the above as a starting point, and partly because I'm lazy and have no free time these days. With that said, here are a select few shots!

Reds still come through surprisingly well

There were also what looked like slight light leaks on quite a few frames, could be the camera or maybe just inconsistent film degradation. Not sure what caused the weird texture though, maybe the scanner?

This was by far the worst light leak I got, but it was also at/past the end of the roll, so I can't complain too much.

All in all, this was a fun little experiment, but honestly not one I'm too eager to repeat, at least not when developing and scanning costs $15/roll. Maybe if I ever learn to develop film myself it'll be more worth playing around with, but in the meantime I have enough to learn about shooting with film without throwing extra variables into the mix.

Photos From my Walk to Work

2025-01-06 00:00:00

It's the first (hopefully only (but probably not)) snowstorm of the year! So of course that means I have to make Intelligent Fox Decisions and walk downtown for work instead of just staying home like a good little remote employee.

Really I just have an appointment at noon so I have to be out of the house anyway, and I figured I'd stop by for coffee in the morning before heading to the library to work and have my meeting^*. But of course because there's over half a foot of snow and ice on the ground the buses are running on a delayed schedule, and I only found that out after waiting at the bus stop for 15 minutes, so I ended up making the 30 (45 in the snow) minute walk to the east end. And took a couple quick pics along the way!

^*Of course, after going through all of this the library turned out to be closed due to the weather so, so much for all of this lmao.

By the way, since I didn't post about it a few days ago, happy new year! I hope you all had a nice holiday and were able to reset a bit for the new year. <3

New Server!

2024-12-23 00:00:00

Quick site update, I moved things over to a fresh new server today! I've been going through a lot of my monthly expenses lately and out of web hosting stuff AWS has been consistently costing me a good bit more than anything else so it's time to accept that I really don't need that scale of infrastructure for this site. For about a third of the cost I can spin up a small VM on DigitalOcean, and I've already been maintaining DNS with my email provider (which feels a little wrong to say but I'd rather that be the entrypoint to prioritize MX records automatically staying up to date).

This was a pretty quick spin-up of a fresh VM so I would not be at all surprised if I missed something. My deploy process seems to work just fine (actually a little cleaner, it's looking like I don't need to reset file perms every deployment anymore) and so far pages are all seemingly functional, so fingers crossed! Hopefully this post goes out just fine and you can read it on the site and any RSS readers. But if you do notice anything off please do drop a comment and let me know (or if somehow comments are what broke, shoot me an email).

Fox Status: November

2024-12-16 00:00:00

Another month, another "oh yeah I should post" thought nagging at the back of my brain that I manage to ignore for a week straight.

I've been missing the days when end of year stuff felt good instead of just stressful and depressing. I don't know if it's just a symptom of getting older or what but I used to be able to just relax around the holidays; give gifts, see family, take time off work, and just generally have a nice wind-down to the year. I guess a big part of it is I've consistently had Big Things going on around the last few months of the year since like, 2021? Whether it's moving or big trips or coordinating holiday stuff with family, I guess the past few years have held a lot more thinking and planning around this time than they used to for me. It's not all bad by any means but it's using a lot of extra brain juice that I already was low on. Being farther away from my immediate family now also hasn't helped that a ton.

That said, November was at least eventful and offered a nice brain reset:

#I got to see Europe again!

My parents had been wanting to get together a Big family trip for quite a few years now. Usually we have a semi-tradition of getting together for a week or so every year or two, and most of the time it's to go to the beach or somewhere local to everyone, just something low-key to get to spend time together. But every handful of years my folks like to do something a bit more involved, so after them doing a lot of planning while I just kinda answered emails going "yeah that sounds good whatever you want," we took a trip out to Europe at the end of the month! I've only travelled out of the country a small handful of times in my life, nearly all of them to the EU, but it's been about 7 years since my last trip (where I went to Poland and Germany with a close friend). This time, we spent most of our time in France, but took day trips to places in Germany and Switzerland, mostly to visit the local Christmas markets since that was my mom's big goal for the trip.

I also took a bunch of pictures while over there, but I've been super slow at going through them all and getting them in a state where I can post 'em anywhere, so I may do a photo dump once I get around to that! I also took a small handful of pics on my Pentax and Vivitar film cameras, so I can't do anything with those until I finish out those film rolls and figure out where I can get them developed.

#Watching

We've still been working through a host of Dropout shows lately, with me being out of town for a while we fell behind a bit on D20 but hopefully will catch up on the latest Misfits and Magic sometime soon! Other than that when we're in the mood we've been watching old Simpsons episodes with dinner, since I've never seen much of that show somehow...

We also watched through Captain Laserhawk on a whim over the span of a weekend and man what a fun show, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it anywhere near as much as I did! Went in basically thinking "oh the funny show where they make Rayman say 'fuck'" but it was surprisingly engaging and way less shill-y than I was expecting a game about Ubisoft games to be? Definitely recommend it if you like wacky cyberpunk anime-inspired shit.

#Working on

Not a ton to report here tbh, I've been slowly poking at the follow-up post I promised last month on email and getting a workable system for dealing with email from the terminal. I'm not sure I'm super happy with it so far tbh, it reads a lot like just a tutorial of how I set things up (which is really just a conglomeration of various other tutorials I read in order to get things set up), instead of a more personal piece on my setup. I dunno, we'll see where that goes.

In a similar vein, I've been messing around with doing more things without leaving the terminal, because I'm just Like That. The latest fun thing has been using Newsboat to manage my RSS feeds for reading other people's blogs and updates and such, and syncing that config across all of my computers to keep things up to date. It's been pretty neat for the most part. I do miss a little bit by not using a web-based feed aggregator (mainly embedded images and syncing with my phone), but I still haven't found a replacement for ol' Google Reader that actually works for me.

#Other thoughts

I've been using Bluesky more lately, despite my thinking that the end of Cohost would be very nearly the end of my time on modern social media. Mostly it's just nice to see people there that I knew from the old Twitter days, and I still have a soft spot for dedicated short-form microblogging. But I also still want to spend more time in an online space I control. I've toyed with the thought of setting up GoToSocial on my server for future fediverse interaction, but that'd be some added cost to my hosting plan, and I still know more people that are in the bsky/ATproto world than on fedi, so I dunno.

I may start opening myself up to making more frequent and smaller posts here, instead of feeling this constant pressure to make Big Long posts exclusively. That'd probably mean just posting updates as they come (if I think of it) instead of doing these monthly status updates where I have to remember everything I did over the last month, so that'd be kinda nice. But I don't want to overwhelm any RSS subscribers with constant short-form nonsense.

Anyway it's after 5pm and I want to log off of the work computer for the day so I'm just gonna blast this one out without any further thought. See ya!

The Great Email Migration

2024-11-14 00:00:00

There's just something freeing about giving even a tiny "fuck you" to a massive corporation, even if they're too big to give a single shit about my morals.

Over the past month-ish I got it into my head that it's time to finally try and de-Google my life a bit. Not entirely by any means—aside from the fact that I still do find some of their services useful, it's unfortunately not very tenable to go 100% Google-free and live a normal life online—but even small steps are significant as far as I'm concerned.

Editorial Note: This was originally supposed to be a semi-detailed post about how I've gone about setting up and using a terminal-based email client, but things kinda got away from me and it turned into a loooong post detailing a lot of aspects of my life with and relationship to email. I've decided to not let this be the computing equivalent of a cake recipe blog post, and am just gonna let this post be my experience with migrating email providers and mailboxes. I'm splitting off the more technical stuff into another post that I should hopefully have up soon!

#How we got here

Truth be told this project has more been driven by the desire to consolidate my online life a bit, particularly when it comes to email, and make managing accounts easier and cleaner. I touched on this in my October update but I've built up a lot of email archives over my life. Technically my first personal email address came provided by our ISP in '99. We had just moved to North Carolina and got blazing fast new internet with Road Runner, and my parents kindly got 6-year-old me all set up with a fancy nc.rr.com address. Unfortunately, those archives are probably lost forever; Road Runner as a named service went away and after some time I lost access to that account, and the old Dell Dimension I had everything downloaded to is long gone.

Thankfully, before TWC retired the Road Runner brand, some little-known startup by the name of Google launched their own (free!) email service. I can't say I jumped on it immediately, but sometime around late 2007 (when they added IMAP support) I decided I wanted an email I had some control over, instead of a mailbox monitored by my parents and attached to my legal name. So I signed up for the Gmail beta and soon got in!

To be honest most of the history between then and now is less interesting than how it all got started, but over the years my inbox went through a lot of changes. What started (and lasted for a while) as a way to ~~talk to~~ annoy the shit out of my school friends ended up becoming a hell-pile of Facebook or forum reply notifications, marketing emails, login codes, and newsletters I didn't sign up for.

I was a hellion the second I got this account. Those were the good old days.

I also went through more than a couple identity changes overtime. Not so much in the "I'm trans" sense since that revelation somehow didn't happen until over a decade later, but I started shifting away from the complete "lol random *holds up spork*" personality I maintained through middle school (which was very much reflected in that first gmail address), and separately found the need to once again maintain a more "professional" address as I started to look at college and find work. At the same time, constantly logging into and out of Gmail accounts was a pain, so instead of dealing with that I set up all of my new addresses to forward to that original inbox. At this point, I had other services like Google+, phone app purchases, and all sorts of stuff tied to that account, so it cemented itself as my "main" account even though it was the address I wanted to distance myself from the most. I actually just looked and I haven't received an email to that address from another actual person since February 2012. And yet it's saved in my password manager as "Google - Main."

#Deciding to migrate

So! Back to what I was saying before taking that trip down memory lane, I realized that it's a lot easier to manage one mailbox than a scrillion, but needed a cleaner way of doing so than what I had been doing. Additionally, I really wanted to get myself set up with email on my own domain. Professionalism/cool factor aside, using my own domain would make any future migrations easier, since I can just update DNS records to whatever future provider and not have to set up Yet Another Forward and update a ton of online accounts.

And, like I said, a chunk of this is also wanting to move at least a bit away from Google. There's a couple caveats here that make this not my primary reason, but it's worth mentioning since it is something I'm aiming to change a bit in my online life.

#But where to?

Despite Gmail's domination of the email address space, there's a lot of different email providers out there! They're hosted all over the world and with a wide variety of features, price ranges, and security options. This isn't a full review post I'm making here so I'm not going to go into too much detail on the options I didn't end up with, but I did spend a good bit of time researching what was out there, and thinking about what I wanted or needed out of a provider. And I promise none of this is any sort of paid promotion, I'll probably end up sounding a bit like I'm trying to sell something but I'm mostly just excited about trying new things.

Ultimately, it came down to a few key criteria, coming from things I do/don't like about Gmail or other providers I've tried in the past:

Must have IMAP support so I don't have to use a proprietary web/phone app.
- Ideally "true" IMAP instead of whatever the fuck Gmail is doing with its label mapping.
Must allow custom domains, and ideally multiple domains within one account (so I can collect both my personal and work emails to the same inbox without setting up forwarding).
Ideally allow native alias support, masked addresses a plus so I don't have to rely on separate services like SimpleLogin or Firefox Relay (though they are both great services I've used in the past).
Ideally some form of contact/calendar support, so I can move those off of Google as well.

Looking online at the countless "what email provider do you use?" forum and Reddit threads, a few names (that aren't Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc.) stood out:

There's a good range here from fully-independent providers (PurelyMail is maintained by one guy) to large, well-known companies. And they all seem like good, reputable providers.

That said, I was able to rule out a couple off the bat. As popular as Proton is (and I actually do still have a free account with them), their focus on security and encryption doesn't quite fit my risk model. The trade-off for E2EE email (that's a lot of E's) is it ranges from a pain-in-the-ass to impossible to manage your mailbox from anything other than their official clients. The bridge app for desktop seems annoying to deal with (admittedly I haven't actually tried), and on mobile you're forced to use their app no matter what. On top of that, the Proton suite provides more than what I'm looking for; I don't need a bundled VPN and password manager and everything, especially for $120/yr.

Tuta got cut for much the same reason. They're very privacy-focused, but they straight up don't have any IMAP/SMTP support at all. If I really need to have encrypted conversations, I can easily do so on a per-email basis with GPG.

Hey sounds neat on the surface and seems to be pretty popular, but dear lord is it over-engineered for my needs. I'm specifically trying to get away from a service that thinks it knows how to sort my emails for me, and if I wanted to bring in my custom domains I'd end up paying more each month than an entire year of almost any of the other options. I believe they also don't support IMAP at all so. No thanks.

PurelyMail seemed very attractive at a wildly cheap $10/year, and I do like the idea of supporting small companies/devs, but in the end they don't quite fit my needs. It's email only, no included calendar or contact syncing, which isn't itself a deal-breaker but other services did offer this all rolled in. More importantly, as this is such a big personal project for me, I want to get it done with a service that has proven reliability, and I do have some concerns about managing such a large mailbox under a provider with a one-person team if things get screwed up at any point.

Finally, mailbox.org, Fastmail, and Zoho. These all seemed like pretty comparable options, with the main differences being their client interfaces and where they're hosted. I actually didn't spend as much time as you may think pondering over these. Despite being a tad more expensive, Fastmail ended up the winner for me. They checked off all my boxes and even have some nice features I didn't expect to like as much as I do (namely catch-all aliases). They've been around for decades and have proven to be reliable, and they've even heavily invested in the development of email standards and the JMAP protocol, which if nothing else tells me they actually give a shit about email and aren't going to give me some warped IMAP implementation. Their biggest downside (and it really is a serious consideration) is that they're hosted in Australia, which are part of the Five Eyes. So for privacy I'm not gaining everything by moving here from Google, but again if I truly need privacy I'm not going to be using plaintext email. And a big goal here is to not be having my emails actively scanned for advertising purposes, so that's a big plus.

#Setting up the inbox

Before I could even think about consolidating my archives, I had to get the new account all up and running. This sounds straightforward enough, but since part of this Whole Thing is also changing how I manage email, I wanted to put some thought into organization. This is mostly going to be me talking about what I think will work for me (and tbh I'm still feeling things out), but hopefully it can serve as a good point of reference for anyone else looking to change up their inbox management!

#Where do the emails go...?

First off, I wanted to start being a lot more rigorous about keeping my inbox to a minimum. Back in the day I didn't even hit the "Archive" button in Gmail; everything was in the inbox forever and ever, and if I needed to remember to get back to something I kept it marked as unread. This of course meant I never actually got around to anything I meant to get around to, and things got lost very easily if I forgot to mark unread or just let new emails pile in and push something important off the screen.

I finally changed up my habits a bit when Inbox was introduced. I got in during the invite period and used the precious few years I had with it, before Google did its Google thing and killed it off, getting my mailbox under control. Things I didn't need anymore got archived and anything I might still need stuck around. This wasn't perfect but having an inbox of a few hundred emails instead of tens of thousands was a big improvement. I've kept up those habits since Inbox's shutdown, hitting Archive whenever I'm done with an email. But this still isn't really ideal. For one, I've never had any real organization method for when I wanted to get back to something (the email snooze functionality never stuck for me). So I'd still have a decent pile of emails in the inbox that had some nebulous "I might need this at some point?" mental note attached to them, but they weren't actionable. Secondly, my archive was now the space in my mailbox that was out of control. Because I never actually deleted anything, the archive became a monolith of all the stuff I actually wanted to archive and every other spam/OTP/newsletter email that I truly would never need again.

So time to finally change that!

First and foremost, I made the decision to switch from labels to folders. Fastmail lets you choose either method, and freely swap between them. Labels behave more like Gmail; an email can have multiple labels to categorize it, there's a default "Inbox" label that gets applied to incoming mail, and the archive ("All Mail") is simply a list of emails that don't have the Inbox, Spam, or Trash label. I don't like this at all, I've decided. I want archiving an email to be a more intentional action, instead of "oh this isn't in the inbox anymore so it gets lumped in with everything else." On top of that I already mentioned how much I dislike Gmail's weird implementation of IMAP, and a big part of that is how labels get mapped to folders when synced to a local client. That means any email with multiple labels gets duplicated into multiple folders and takes up extra space, and adding/removing labels means copying or deleting an email from a single local folder. Which means that to "delete" an email can mean two things from a technical standpoint, and I don't like that.

So I'm using folders. Next step is deciding what those folders should be. I wanted to have a clear way of organizing things based on what area of my life they fit into. So a place to dump emails related to work, travel, development (not as part of a job), and social stuff seemed pretty obvious. But making a handful of folders that I'd have to check up on regularly would also be messy and time-consuming, and I want a setup that can facilitate an actual "workflow" for dealing with my inbox. I've been a fan of the GTD methodology when it comes to work, and while I'm far from a zealot about it I've found it useful enough to try and incorporate a bit here. After some thought I ended up with this:

All of the non-numbered folders are still kinda subject to change as I decide if they're useful, but the important ones are those first four. Whenever I go through my inbox, I take a glance at each email and decide if it's something I can do something with, and if so when I should do something about it. If I have to reply and can do so within a few minutes, I just get it out of the way and do so (granted I haven't received many emails that fall under this category since starting this system, so it remains to be seen how this works out in practice). If it's important but not something I can deal with immediately, it gets sorted into one of those four folders so I can keep track of when I do need to take care of them. I'm not as rigorous about keeping "un-actionable" emails out of those folders; if I get a receipt or a notice of a new Patreon post that I can't technically reply to but want to remember exists later (e.g. logging the purchase in my budget or looking at an artist's latest drawing of naked animal people on not-my-work-computer), those get sorted too. But anything else gets either moved into a category folder or immediately deleted. And if it's some marketing nonsense that I definitely didn't sign up for but some website decided I wanted to see anyway, I take a moment to unsubscribe and/or block the sender.

As for the Archive folder, I haven't fully figured that out yet. If I'm categorizing emails into folders after they're no longer "actionable," what goes in the archive? Maybe that's where I'll put my actual conversations, where the threads between friends can go when the topic's closed and done. That'll be my version of a desk drawer full of letters to look back on someday. I dunno, I'll figure those things out as they come I suppose.

So far this setup has been a huge mental relief though, since I've been dealing with a lot of "verify your email" or "here's your login link/passcode" emails as I move various online accounts over. I've been able to quickly deal with and trash those as they come, and that leaves space for actually reading and replying to the emails from real people (few they may be). I'm going to try and stick with this workflow for a good while, and make sure it does work for me, but after a few weeks of working this way it's felt very Nice!

#...and where do they come from?

The other piece to all of this is managing how emails get to me in the first place. Email spam is a forever problem that I don't think is going anywhere, but there are some steps I can take to help cut down on it.

With Gmail, they've long since offered an aliasing functionality to help categorize emails as they come in. If your address is XxTheDarkOnexX@gmail.com you can give someone XxTheDarkOnexX+banking@gmail.com, and any emails they send to that address still come to your inbox. This lets you set up filters to direct any mail sent to that address to a folder/label, and also can alert you if a company starts selling your data (if you start getting emails from CryptoCoinBank, Inc. directed at furryfox91+mcdonalds@gmail.com, you know exactly who sold you out).

There are a couple of issues with this specific approach, however. The more minor one is pure preference for me but I think that aliasing method looks a little ugly. I prefer clean and concise addresses where possible, and this just feels messier to me. The bigger issues are that this method is both more obvious and more likely to run into verification issues. If a website form is dumb it may be very strictly pattern-matching something like [A-Za-z1-9]+@[A-Za-z1-9]+\.[A-Za-z]{3}, which would reject any address with non-alphanumeric characters (not to mention any TLD with more than 3 characters like .co.uk). And if a webform is smart, it'll know that everything after the + is superfluous and be able to strip it out and have your base address anyway.

There are two much more preferable approaches here. I'm making a mixed use of both:

Masked addresses. These are completely randomly-generated addresses that have no direct association with your inbox, and simply serve to forward/redirect any emails to you while keeping your actual address completely secret. There are a few services that offer this functionality on its own, like SimpleLogin and Firefox Relay, mentioned above. Fastmail has their own masked email functionality built in so I'm just using that since it lets me keep everything in one place, and they even integrate nicely with my password manager so I can generate a new address while creating an account somewhere in a single step.
"Email Address" aliases and catch-alls. These are effectively the same as a plus-address alias, but their setup will differ a bit between providers, and importantly they're formatted more cleanly and can fully obfuscate your "true" address. For example, even though I might own the domain example.com and have my actual address be me@example.com, I can sign up for a site with facebook@example.com. Emails sent to that address still come to me, are much more likely to be accepted by form validation, and there's nothing linking that address to my main one. If I start getting spam to that alias I can just delete/block it. And if I want to take things a step further, I can also buy domain2.com and give certain sites something@domain2.com, providing even more obfuscation (though at this point I may be better off generating a masked address, depending on what I'm signing up for).

All together, I'm hoping that I can really crack down on spam (and set up rules to help categorize incoming mail) much more effectively this way. I'm sure it's not a completely watertight system—I still have my general contact email listed on my homepage and I'm sure some web crawler is smart enough to scrape that—but it should help a lot.

#Bringing the old stuff over

Of course though, it couldn't be all quite so easy. Despite my desires to cut down on all the email cruft, I'm a horrible horrible data hoarder (side-eyeing my 15TB+ of storage in my desktop that's perpetually near-full). So I couldn't let myself just say fuck it and start fully fresh. No, I needed to import all of my old mailboxes into this new account because I'm just Like That. So I sat out to take on the incredibly daunting task of sorting through 17 years of Gmail history, to trash things I don't actually need, and categorize things I do/might.

Spoiler alert, this part of the project hasn't gone at all according to plan, for better or worse.

The first step within this step is to run a simple mailbox migration. This was pretty straightforward with the built-in tools Fastmail has, that let you just sign in with Google to pull everything in (as well as a host of other services, direct IMAP connection, or MBOX upload), but if it came to it I was ready to download my entire archive and manually sync things over.

I decided to start small and migrate my two most recent Gmail accounts first. These accounts were created within the past few years, when I started leaning more into my identity as Mervyn and also began pursuing a legal name change. As a result these mailboxes were pretty painless to bring in; one of them had only a few hundred emails total, and everything I wanted to keep was already nicely labeled. The most I had to do was sort through a few threads with multiple labels to deduplicate them.

The other account was slightly larger and less organized, but still only a couple thousand total emails, and most of them were from predictable noreply addresses so they were easy to run a search on and mass-delete. Deduplication was a bit more of a pain here. A lot of correspondences had labels applied to the thread as a whole in Gmail, which reasonably equates to each email in that thread getting put into a matching folder. But that included emails I sent in those threads, so I had to spend some time sorting through those and removing everything from me from those individual folders, while making sure they remained in the Sent box. This was more than a little awkward to do in the web interface so I ended up just doing it all on my computer and syncing the maildir back up.

While I was at it I also set up continuous mail fetch, so I could keep pulling in any new mail to those old addresses. Since it's going to be a while before I have all my online accounts updated with new aliases, I would still like to spend less time signed in to multiple different places for email. For now I just have a rule set up to direct newly imported email to a dedicated "Inbox - Gmail" to remind me that anything coming in there should be updated.

And then I got to my "main" account.

This is where I started to break down mentally. Right off the bat it's intimidating enough, looking at near-exactly 17 years worth of emails and trying to conceptualize how much that might add up to (that's over half of my entire life so far!)

The grand total? Well, I don't have an exact count because of Gmail's grouping of email threads and duplication across labels, but I scanned my synced archive on that account and came up with nearly 202,000 total emails. Add in everything in my sent box and it's closer to 213,000.

Yeah, I've got my work cut out for me.

After working up the courage to do so, I kicked off the migration before bed one night, not sure how long it would take to complete. By the time I woke up it was all done, with seemingly no issues! I dumped everything that got imported into a subfolder to deal with over time, so I could keep the rest of my inbox/workflow moving smoothly. In fact, I went ahead and sorted through the imported inbox with my new methodology, and quickly brought it down from 70-something to zero.

I spent chunks of time over the next few days trying my best to sort through things. I had a handful of labels/folders that thankfully were well-organized; stuff like everything involving my high school robotics team, or everything from college. These were easy to deal with. The hardest part was telling myself that no, I didn't have a real need to keep around the folder of topic reply notifications from the Warrior Cats RPG forums in 2009. Some of the other labels I waffled back and forth on for a while, ultimately opting to keep things like correspondences with clients when I did freelance work. I doubt I'll ever really need those emails but I can at least categorize them cleanly.

The Archive folder has, by far, been the worst to deal with. I started off doing a few mass searches for emails from domains I knew I could delete; mostly any companies and mailing list/newsletter updates. Then I went for things like old receipts and long-since paid invoices, having to manually sort through those results to make sure I pulled out anything actually important (namely, invoices for something I'm still waiting to receive, or for very significant purchases like my car or fursuit). After dozens of mass deletions from filters like from:("pizza hut" OR "wendy's" OR "newegg" OR "united-ti.org") I had surprisingly managed to trim the archive down by about 90k. Not bad at all!

That's when things got tough though. Because amongst the remaining swaths of emails, many of which my searches hadn't caught but still needed to go, were countless threads involving actual people. Conversations with friends, partners, family, professors, and online acquaintances from years ago. The hard part was no longer picking out the automated trash, it was looking through the human connections that happened.

I'm now certain that one of the hardest things in the world is reading a thread between you and your best friend that you haven't talked to in a decade, and making the decision to click delete.

Ultimately, I couldn't actually make that decision. At least not on an individual basis. Instead I spent days reading through those old conversations. Reliving memories of what I now recognize as a simpler time, even though I didn't appreciate it for what it was back then. Remembering the names of people I haven't thought about in too long. All those 10+ person threads I started to be annoying at my friends in, sending stupid memes and jokes for days on end.

Reading texts between myself and the first partner I had after realizing I wasn't straight, reading texts between myself and them on the day of realizing I wasn't straight.

I shook myself out of it, eventually. I logged into that old Gmail account one more time, started up a takeout request to download my entire mailbox, backed up the 10GB file for safekeeping, and deleted the entire remaining imported folder from Fastmail. It's time to start a new desk drawer of letters, and to store the old one safely in the attic. Maybe I'll have a need, or a desire, to revisit those memories someday. But until then they should remain truly archived.

With that done, I now, finally, had everything set up nicely for myself. Shiny new email addresses, detailed organization methods, and a plan to try and make the most out of having an email account.

#But what does it all mean?

In the end, the question that really matters is: what am I hoping to get out of all of this? Am I just making a big deal over something as simple as a new email address? People change emails all the time, why is this worth a 5,000-word essay? All very good questions. I'm sorry for the 5,000 words.

But I guess what it boils down to is... this isn't just a new address (or set of aliases or what have you). This is me taking my first steps in a long time at taking some real control over my life and presence online. This is all part of a shift in how I want to engage with the internet, with social media, and with people. For years my inbox was not too different from any given social media feed; endless lines of content to scroll past, glance at, and click away from, with more advertisements visible at any given time than anything coming from a real person. But it doesn't have to be like that at all. Now more than ever, there's little that's more valuable than real human connection. Now that I'm this far into it, I realize that's what I want from this project: a mindset where I can focus on people, and on being a person. Is that pretentious? Sure as hell. Is it still a worthy aim? I think so.

In the end it's not even really about de-Googling. It's a nice moral stance to take, but a less achievable goal than my own. After all, Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours.

Thank you for reading,

Mervyn Fox

Fox Status: October

2024-11-08 00:00:00

Well, I shoulda buckled down and written more about the past month when I wasn't feeling awful about the country and the world.

So I guess to address the obvious, the election happened and it didn't go well. I honestly don't know if there's a lot I can say to that all right now; I'm still in a pretty messed up emotional state about it and there's nothing I could say that others can't and haven't said more eloquently. But suffice to say there's a lot of feelings going around in our household. I think I got most of the heavier emotions out by this point but trying to focus on work these past couple of days has proven more than a little difficult. I've been trying to get what rest I can and that's helped a lot, got me feeling at least a little bit less defeatist and more resolute. The best thing we can do is be there for each other, and I'm gonna try and make a last-minute 2024 resolution to do that more than I have been over the past couple of years.

With that said...

#October was a Lot, and also almost nothing

I swear I meant to write more last month. I wanted to talk a little bit more about some of the side projects I've been poking at, and how work and life have been going. I got down a couple of ideas for some posts to write up and then just never got around to writing them. That's at least partially due to work being very busy over these past few weeks, and I also consistently have very little time outside of work to do things like sit down and get words down. Usually I find time to write during my lunch break, or if I do have any other downtime during the workday. And it's not like I had zero free time last month, but what time I did have I mostly ended up using on fucking around with email migration (I'll get to that) or just distracting myself with nonsense. I dunno, it's been a little weird, I think maybe depressive feelings have been on the upswing as the weather gets colder and that's just making things Weird.

Bottom line is, I'm hoping to figure out a better schedule for myself so I can actually find time to write and post here without distracting myself or feeling like I'm cutting into other work/free time. We'll see! In the meantime, some of the stuff I have been working on lately.

#Email, email, email (200k of them!)

My big personal project lately has been driven by the fact that I'm progressively more fed-up with Google having its fingers in every aspect of my life. I actually couldn't tell you the exact thing that finally sent me down this rabbit hole, but something got me researching email providers a few weeks back, looking at options that would let me have a good bit of control over my email and ideally consolidate the countless addresses/inboxes I've built up over the decades. And boy are there a lot of options.

After a lot of research and thought, I settled on Fastmail to migrate to, since they checked all the boxes for what I need out of an email provider (mainly native IMAP/SMTP and custom domain support), and also offered a month-long trial so I could make sure I could get everything set up the way I wanted.

That all said, I have a fancy new email address I can be reached at! I've been wanting to use email a bit more lately as an actual communication method, instead of just a collection bin for one-time passcodes and "BONTO! misses you." So with this project comes a shift in how I manage my emails, and being much more liberal about unsubscribing from mailing lists and deleting email instead of archiving it. But hey if you're reading this and want to say hi, I absolutely encourage you to do so over email! I've got it listed on my homepage (rot-13 encoded as a half-assed anti-spam measure so you'll unfortunately need JS enabled for now to see it).

The big thing that I've forced myself to deal with now is... I have about 210,000 emails in my archives from my various Gmail accounts over the years, and for some reason I've convinced myself I need to go through them to figure out what's worth saving. So that's been occupying a good bit of what little free time I have lately. I'm planning on writing up a whole detailed post about that process, but suffice to say it's nice and daunting. :)

#Other stuff I've been up to

Like I said, October was kind of a weirdly nothing-month for me. Whether it's early-onset seasonal depression or just a lull in things to do, I don't have like... any "news" to share, other than a couple things that I've been up to with the polycule.

I mentioned last month that I was excited about the new D20 season, and it's more than lived up to the hype! No spoilers but goddamn has this season been a wild ride so far, and a hell of a lot heavier than I was expecting at points. Episode 6 (Code Crimson) was one of my favorite episodes of anything ever I think.

We've also been continuing to play a lot of Warframe with the polycule lately, it's been a really nice way to spend evenings together, and we're all hyped for the 1999 expansion coming... sometime next month? I haven't had quite as much time to play as the others since I have an earlier bedtime, but I finally got around to unlocking Steel Path and doing a few circuit runs to unlock some incarnon weapons! I like seeing the Big Damage Numbers :3

Other than that, I think the only other newsworthy thing for me is I'm finally trying to regain some semblance of a social life starting this week. At least partially spurred by the election and the desire to be there for others, but honestly something I've been working on a lot internally and in therapy over this past year, I'd like to get back to a point of interacting with people regularly. It's something I've been getting progressively worse at for the past couple of years and after a lot of self-reflection and internal work I'm wanting to start actually doing something about it. To that end I've tried picking up my old Mastodon account again, and finally posting a bit on the Bluesky profile I created and never touched forever ago. I'm working on getting my social links updated to point to the places I'm going to try being active, because somehow I'm even less keen on touching Twitter again now than I have been for the past year. Feel free to hit me up there too!

I think that's all for now! I'm gonna make a true effort to get some other writing up here too over this month, I would love to talk your ears off about this stupid fucking email migration project and embarrass myself by revealing that I'm doing email from my terminal emulator instead of any sort of sensible GUI.

Until then!

Fox status: September

2024-10-02 00:00:00

(Update 2024/10/16: Renaming this for September since it probably makes more sense for these posts to be retrospectives of the past month lmao.)

It's now been one day since Cohost went read-only and, even though I didn't exactly post regularly there about what I've been up to, I'm already missing the sense of community and life updates and stuff. So gonna give a shot at semi-occasional posts like this where I just say "here's what I've been reading/watching/doing" that don't come with the pressure of having to write a full, thought-out post about A Topic or anything. I mean that's kinda what blogging is supposed to be anyway right? Don't wanna let this thing get too formal now.

#Reading

I technically started reading Leviathan Falls, the last book in The Expanse series (aside from the final short story), back in January 2023, but I was struggling a lot around then with trying to settle in to a new place and lots of general Life Things were happening, and I found myself basically picking up my kindle, reading half of the first page of chapter 6, and putting it back down again when I couldn't focus.

But recently, with Corey releasing the first book of a new series that I also want to get to, I picked it back up again for real, started from the beginning, and am now a little over a third of the way through. I had to catch up a bit on things I forgot from the earlier books, given how long it's been, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far! If you haven't touched The Expanse yet and enjoy near-future, relatively grounded-in-reality sci-fi (at least as far as like, physics working and the time scales of space travel), I highly recommend it. There's also a show that closely follows the first few books, and loosely follows the next few up until book 6.

#Watching

Most of what I've been watching lately has been dinnertime TV with the household, which tends to be whatever the newest release on Dropout is. This past week that's been a new Dimension 20 season which I've been incredibly excited about since it's S2 of Misfits & Magic, and in between those we've been catching each new Make Some Noise, and very occasionally watching Dirty Laundry

Tbh there's been a bit of a lull in the Dropout content we're actively interested in this past month or so though, so we've been filling the gap with my first watch of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Somehow I actually had never seen more than an episode or two of any FMA until now???^* Wild considering some of the weird obscure anime I used to watch growing up, but very glad to be catching up on it now. Not sure if we'll go back to watch the original series at any point since I'm constantly hearing mixed things about which version is better and if you should watch both, etc.

Other than that, in my own exceedingly fleeting free time I've been occasionally watching through Dark Matter, since I read the book some years back and really liked it. The show is... alright I guess? It's so far much slower and grittier than I was expecting for something based off a fairly fast-paced quick read thriller, but it's otherwise interesting enough to hold my attention. I'm only on like episode 4/9 so maybe it picks up.

^{* Just checked and I watched the first two episodes in February 2015 and then nothing until this year, lol.}

#Working on

Aside from all my talk lately on getting this blog up and running, most of my work has been at-my-job work. Our main project right now is rebuilding our university's main news site, since it's on Drupal 7 which has been threatening to hit EOL for... quite some time now but it really for real truly is come January 2025, so we're finally getting around to updating it to D10 (not even 11, but that should be an easier undertaking when we get to it). Most of what that work entails is figuring out how the fuck recipes are supposed to work in new Drupal versions (spoiler: shrug emoji; there's next to no rigid documentation and the community response seems to be "it's still a work in progress but also it's in production right now"). I dunno, it's a learning experience at least?

Outside of work I'm continuing to poke at Laravel since I do really enjoy working with this framework. Might have some other projects to pick up that I can use it for but nothing that's so concrete I can talk about it here. I'm just having fun learning it and also trying to get up to speed on other "modern" web tech like Nginx and Postgres (since I never really grew out of my rigid LAMP stack mindset from learning web dev in the early 2000s).

That's about all for now I think!

Comments online!

2024-09-26 00:00:00

Alright apparently the strat here is to just post about how I'll "maybe think about adding this feature eventually" because that means I'll just do it within the next day or two.

I gave in and went ahead and added a little comment widget to my posts here! Definitely needs testing in production but that's how I roll. I'm using a little service called Cusdis, which is a privacy-focused comment widget alternative to Disqus, because I'm not about to ruin this site with a smidge of third-party tracking tools or anything.

Because it's an open, anyone-can-comment type system, all comments have to be manually reviewed/approved before they show up, so it may take a bit before they're visible since it's all down to my schedule and when I check the dashboard, but I'll try and be good about that.

I also added a shoutbox page not tied to any one post, because I still miss my old freewebs homepage and all the shouts I got there.

On rebuilding mervyn.online

2024-09-25 00:00:00

Sure I'll throw a blog up on my server. How long could that take, ten minutes?

Oh, Mervyn-of-a-week-ago, you naïve fool. You know you can't ever do things the straightforward way. WordPress who?

(Side note, literally as I began writing this post I got a notification from the WordPress Slack that WP Engine has filed a C&D with Automattic CEO photomatt over him berating WPE during a WordCamp event that they sponsored, and: lmao)

#It's one composer package, what could it cost, 100MB?

To be honest, I'd been sort of half-heartedly poking at reworking my site for the better part of the past year. I've been wanting to learn Laravel for a while and this would be a good way to dip my toe in before working on any bigger projects with it. So I popped up a new branch and opened up a few docs pages and started composer require-ing all over the place off and on for the next few months.

Well, turns out it's easy to get completely lost in the sauce with Laravel. It's a very open platform, which is great after dealing with WordPress and Drupal professionally for years, and having a history with CodeIgniter. But that means it's very easy to justify "oh I'll just install this package" to myself when I want to do something like, say, set up a basic admin panel.

The git graph of someone who totally has a vision for the thing they're building, trust me.

Anyway long story short is I spent a while making a mess of my codebase trying to get the ultimate relational database tables set up, when I stepped back and thought, "is this really what I want for my personal site?"

No, not really.

I love a complex webapp with a robust API and interconnected parts all over the place, don't get me wrong, but this is a tiny site that I want to exist as a place to say "hi, I'm Mervyn, and I'm here." A place to link to my other stuff and host a small blog with my thoughts and that's about it. Over the course of 8 years I'd made 130 updates to the repo (many of which were updating social links), and then I didn't touch it at all for over a year. I don't want a complicated app that I have to maintain, I want a flexible underlying codebase with relatively few dependencies that I only need to think about when I want to update some content.

#Oh yeah, .md is neat actually

As bad luck would have it, while I was having a crisis over all the time I sunk into going down the wrong path, Cohost announced their imminent shutdown. And it got me thinking again about wanting to set up a blog And as I thought about the posts I enjoyed reading on Cohost and how much its users had done with basically a simple markdown editor (CSS crimes capabilities aside). I realized I first off didn't need to deal with some sort of fancy rich text editor, I don't need to figure out Gutenberg or recreate anything fancy, and second off I don't need a bunch of complicated relational data management to just... put some text up for people to read. But at the same time writing every post in raw HTML would introduce a little too much friction, so markdown is pretty much the perfect middle ground.

So I did a bit of searching around for ways to implement a markdown-based blog. I went over my main reasoning for landing on this setup in my last post, but the two big driving factors were wanting to make it easy for me to write from anywhere, and not wanting to deal with database backups or risk losing all my content.

So I found Prezet.

I'm actually only looking into this now as I write this post, but Prezet has only been around for a few months, with its first proof of concept being released just this past May. I didn't realize just how baby this project was! That said, it seems pretty robust for being in effectively early alpha stages, so I'm not unhappy with this choice for the time being by any means (if anything, maybe I could open some contributions to fix the few grievances I do have so far).

Anyway, at its core Prezet is a collection of models that take in markdown files stored within the Laravel app, parse their frontmatter (metadata) and content, and create a blog index and views to format and display those files as blog posts. It's not too much different in presentation from the various static site generators out there, it just does the processing on view instead of at build time. It provides some nice base templates to work from and is pretty extendable as far as views and styles go, which is nice and definitely something I'll be poking at over time. It's got support for a selection of default frontmatter properties like title, category/tags, draft status, publish date, etc., and also lets you add your own (I've already added type to differentiate between posts and pages like the about page).

I spent some time writing up my first post and getting a feel for how easy it was (generally, pretty easy! a few quirks aside), and relatively quickly had a workable local copy of the site running. Neat! I bet that means I can get this whole thing online in the next few minutes!

It was, of course, another six days before any of this made it to the internet.

#Adding my little customizations

Of course, before I made this all public, I had to make it ever so slightly more presentable. Like I mentioned, there are a couple of little quirks in Prezet that you have to fiddle with if you want to do too much customization. The first is image handling – by default the preprocessor will only accept .png, .jpg, and .webp. And those are hard-coded in the vendor class, so RIP to any .jpegs I export from Lightroom and forget to rename. Even a PNG with transparency doesn't render properly due to the built-in image optimization (a good thing for the sake of bandwidth, but still...). And any sort of animated gif is out of the question. To top it all off, all images get served up with webp headers anyway, so sure. While all of this can theoretically be overridden in sub-classes, it's a bit much for me to want to bother with right now.

The more important thing that I wanted to implement was some custom metadata. Ultimately it'd be fun to add a bunch of extra frontmatter and build in some good old Livejournal or dA-styled "mood, listening to, reading, etc." fields for my posts. Sure I could just dump them in the content but I think metadata is fun. But to start, I at least wanted to let myself denote if a file was an actual blog post, or a more static page, so I could use the latter for things like an about page or contact info or something, and have a way to say "don't show a post date on this or list it on the index."

Adding the extra field was easy, the Prezet docs have some basic info on overriding the Model class and adding your field, and then you just pop it in any given file's frontmatter and you're good to go. The headache came when I needed to actually query and filter by that metadata. While Prezet does create a simple SQLite index database to help with post querying, it only selects a few important bits of metadata to store in columns, like post date and draft status. Most of the metadata goes into a serialized array, which you can't exactly just add to your where clause. So of course instead of trying to work through a clean and efficient solution I just:

$type = $request->input('type', 'post');
if ($type !== 'all') {
    $query->where('frontmatter', 'like', '%"type":"' . $type . '"%');
}

...and called it a day. Ah well, it works.

Overall I'm pretty happy with this package, and glad it seems to be seeing active dev work (two new releases since I first installed it last week). But if it doesn't work out, I'm very happy with my decision to keep everything in plain ol' files, so I can move over to whatever else does work at any point.

#Keeping my old landing page

It was already enough work to get the blog set up, so as much as I'd like to rework my landing page at some point, this wasn't the time to do it. The downside to that decision was that page was this weird marriage between a static site and dynamic custom MVC platform that I hacked together along with a colleague back in my side job in undergrad a decade ago. That of course was going to be 0% compatible with Laravel so I still had to make this decision between just turning it into a fully static HTML page, and trying to pick apart and piece together my old template files and libraries and rework them for Laravel. I ended up going with the latter because of two reasons:

I wanted to keep my silly little functionality where each page load shows a randomized selection of descriptor strings under my name.
I made the questionable decision some years back to put both my personal and professional domains on the same codebase, and just let the site determine which content to throw up at runtime depending on the request URL. I'm not sure if that's going to be a good idea going forward (less concerned with the separation of identities and moreso with it just being a headache to maintain), but it was easier than separating it out now.

So I got to work porting everything over. Most of this wasn't actually too bad, just lots of replacing my custom template function calls with blade components. I crudely implemented my URL detection in the landing page controller and just kept all the variable content in arrays in the blade templates, so on load it grabs what it needs from either the public or professional array and pops that content on the page. Really not a good way of handling this but I have so little content on the landing page it's... fine it's fine it's okay it's fine.

The biggest headache I encountered was, perhaps predictably, the goddamn JavaScript libraries. Used to be adding fun cool JS functionality to your site was easy; you'd download the latest jQuery.min.js, pop it on your server, and add a script tag before any of your custom scripts. Now everyone wants you to bundle your assets, build an app.js, require your dependencies, do an npm run build... absolute nonsense. But Prezet uses Vite which uses a build pipeline so oh well. It does make writing custom stuff easier. But holy shit is it a pain the moment you need to do anything involving legacy packages. The proper method of adding jQuery and Bootstrap dependencies was an option, but not one I wanted to pursue because this landing page is going to be replaced and I won't be using them moving forward. But trying to just import a vendor JS file or two was flat out not working no matter what I tried. The build pipeline kept pulling them in in an arbitrary order, and refused to acknowledge that I needed jQuery before jQuery UI, and both before Bootstrap, and all three of those before my custom script. Even trying to just link them as static assets instead of bundling was giving me grief, so after an afternoon of headaches I did the sensible thing and just linked to their respective CDNs because I couldn't bring myself to care any longer.

But hey, it all worked out, and I could now visit my local dev homepage to see the old landing page, and hit /blog to see my posts!

#Now to bring it live...

Aaaand then I had to get the whole thing online.

Should be simple, right?

In theory honestly, yes, it should be simple. I already had my EC2 instance running, all my domains pointed at it, SSL all configured... Realistically it could/should be as easy as updating my httpd DocumentRoot and pushing the site files up. But I wanted to be all fancy and make future deployments easy (which I think is reasonable considering making/editing a post would involve a deployment).

In the past, I made use of a git post-receive hook that I wrote for my first internship, again a decade ago, that basically checks the branch that was pushed (checking against the configured prod or dev branch), navigates to the associated webroot, and performs a git pull in place to fetch all changes. This worked fine when there was a 1:1 mapping of what was in the repo to production files, not so much when you have a build process and are running a platform that has to update an index database and clear caches. Doubly so when everything in the webroot is now owned by the vcs:vcs user/group and while that's fine for read-only stuff, things get messy when www-data can't write a log file or update the index. So I needed a better solution.

My first attempt was less than stellar. I figured, "why bother with fancy CI pipelines and having to touch Jenkins again? I'll just add all the build steps to the post-receive hook!" Well first off you still get everything from Apache to Ubuntu complaining about file permissions at you when it's all trying to run as the vcs user, and secondly it turns out that AWS's cheapest tier VMs aren't the best at handling building node packages.

"Hmm, why is my SSH tunnel not responding or my homepage loading?"

So I resigned myself to needing to build the site elsewhere before deploying. I spent the better part of an evening trying to poke at CI deployments through GitHub and AWS CodeDeploy, but between the learning curve that I didn't feel like climbing at the time and the associated extra cost, I gave up fairly quickly. In the end I realized the best path truly is the simplest – just rsync that shit.

I got to work on a simple deploy script to handle everything, so I don't have to run a bunch of different commands every time I want to push something up. And then a quick Lando command that I can pass some config variables to that say where the files are going, so when I'm ready to push up I can just do lando deploy-(dev|prod) and the script will build all of the app packages, check out the correct deployment branch, set a few file permissions, push things up, and be done! Dead simple. Except I still had a couple small issues.

Namely, the blasted file permissions. No matter what I set ahead of time before deployment, there are certain cache files and directories that get their ownership set on deploy to the user doing the deployment. And then when www-data comes along to write a view cache, it gets mad that it doesn't have group write perms. So ultimately I couldn't fully avoid having to SSH into the server manually for a deployment to run another script that would set the proper write access. I did try adding an incron job to have it run when it detected a deployment, but that just crashed the server again, whoops. I'm sure there's more I could look into there that would make for a cleaner solution, but really I'm just glad to have something semi-functional.

#So how does it all work in practice?

Not too bad, actually! I know I'm only two posts in so far but I've got what seems like it might be a decent process:

#1. Write a post

Okay maybe a "draw the rest of the fucking owl" kinda step but I'm not here to talk about my writing process because I sure as hell don't have one. But I did want to make getting some words down easy, so I created a template in my Obsidian vault that pre-populates a new note with the basic frontmatter and generates a post slug, so I don't even have to deal with remembering the default metadata I need to include. I get my thoughts down in that note, do any formatting, and let my vault sync itself across my computers and phone so I can write in bursts from anywhere. Admittedly, sometimes I do also write directly in the site repo, but PhpStorm's markdown editor is decidedly less pretty, and if I want to pick up my writing somewhere else I gotta push and pull the whole site repo.

#2. Get it in the content directory

Whenever I want to see how the post is gonna look on the site, it's as simple as copying it to the content directory (storage/blog/content/YYYY/MM/DD-post-slug is the structure I've settled on for now), spinning up my local dev instance, and loading it up. I've also been creating a branch in the repo to work from for each post, so I can make checkpoints as I write, but I'm thinking those will generally get squashed and rebased onto main whenever I publish.

#3. Push it live

After all my hard work and headaches, this is thankfully fairly easy now. Once I'm good to publish a post, I set the draft property to false, make sure it's on the main branch, and hit lando deploy-prod (if I want to be extra sure it's good I can merge and deploy to dev first, but for content updates this isn't strictly necessary). Everything gets built and updated locally, pushed up to the server, and I can check to see if the permissions broke and SSH in to run my perm script if needed. Overall if I'm honest I'm a fan of this process. It hits a very good balance of "I just gotta get my words written with no friction" and "I like to mess around with technical things and play in the terminal," so I'm happy with it so far. Now just to see how regularly I actually have things to say.

#Final thoughts

I'll admit, I started this last section yesterday, thinking maybe I'd write about some of what I wanted to do next here, like implementing an RSS/Atom feed. But this morning I went ahead and did that so there's now a feed available if you want to keep up with my posts here. It's not 100% perfect – image embedding needs to be set up separately because of the way Prezet handles image optimizations, and it formats section headers a little funny, but like with everything else about this site so far: at least it's there, I can fix it later. Probably.

And part of me still wonders if I should try and figure out how to get a basic comment system implemented here. I don't want to deal with managing a full content database, and I really really don't want to add something invasive like Disqus, but I think there are a few similar options out there that are a bit more privacy-focused I might look into. We'll see.

If nothing else, this has been a fun week-long journey! Still no idea how often I'll post stuff up here but I'd like to give it an honest try. It was a real fun learning experience getting everything working, and there's plenty to do to make it look and function a bit nicer.

That's all for now!

Hello, (my) world

2024-09-23 00:00:00

Well, guess I'm here now. Please excuse the mess while I make this all look/function better.

I think one thing I've learned over the past couple years is just how much it sucks to rely on one or two places to exist socially online. I've never had the mental capacity to maintain an online presence on more than one social media site at a time, but goddamn does it feel bad having to pack it all up and move my primary online space every six months; whether because some rich transphobic asshole that bought the site has been making it hell to exist on, or because some rich transphobic asshole that bought the site has been making it hell to exist on, or maybe the one site that actually felt comfortable to exist on and was run by good caring people just couldn't pay the bills.

I did write a short post on Cohost last week about how un-social I've been feeling lately, and how despite that it still has been a decent gut punch to learn that the place I've been feeling most comfortable is going away. I don't really have too much more to say that won't be just me failing to put my feelings into words, but suffice to say it doesn't feel great, even though I fully understand the position the site was in and that they did everything they could to avoid things reaching this point. I dunno, it sucks.

#So what now?

I've never been good at long-form journaling or maintaining a blog. Over the years I've failed to keep up with journal entries on deviantArt and Fur Affinity, and my Tumblr and Cohost pages always just ended up being more shares than my own thoughts. But... I dunno, something's been nagging at the back of my mind for the better part of a year, telling me I should try writing more. Honestly even well before the Cohost shutdown announcement I'd been thinking about adding a blog section to my website, something to make it more than just a "here's my profile links" landing page. I guess now's a good a time as any to really give that a try.

For now, I'm going to not force myself to do too much at once. The first order of business is to get this online and playing nicely with my existing landing page, then maybe I can look at tying the whole thing together so it's not just this out-of-the-box blogging platform with a bunch of years-old raw PHP hacked in to show my homepage. And in between all that I'll try to find time to write down my thoughts on... probably anything? I really don't know what I'm gonna talk about here yet. Maybe will spend more time with the hobbies I've been neglecting, so don't be surprised if I start posting some of my photography or talking about coffee or something. Keeping a public log of my interests and what I'm working on, that sounds nice. I hope it sounds nice to you too.

#Speaking of the blog

This is all still very much getting set up, and I'm actively writing this post in my notes app instead of on the site, but I think I'm gonna want to just get this online as soon as I can, before Cohost goes read-only. There's not gonna be much functionality past "here are my posts" for now because of that, and because I'm still trying to settle on exactly what kinda setup I want here.

Right now I'm using a neat little package for Laravel called Prezet, which is a Markdown-based blogging platform. I decided pretty much right away that I wanted a file-based system for this blog, for a few reasons:

I can more easily write from anywhere. I don't need to be online at a desktop/laptop, logged into an admin panel to work on a post. I can just open up any notes app, possibly synced across my devices, and just jot down some thoughts in a simple and universal syntax. Lower friction == I'll probably write more.
I don't need to worry about maintaining a whole web stack. As comfortable as I am doing whole server management, it's not something I want to dedicate that much time to for a small personal site. I spent quite a while playing around with porting my landing page to Laravel and getting complicated database relations set up for my social links before realizing that's all just... so much overkill.
It's extremely portable. Sure I have a whole Lando/Docker container I spin up to work on the site and there are a multitude of dependencies to build and deploy, but everything I need to bring the site up anywhere can be contained within one repository. And, crucially, all of my posts can be saved in the repo too. I don't need to worry about database backups because all of the content is just in files. The only database Prezet uses is a single SQLite file for indexing and metadata.

I'm not 100% married to Prezet yet, and it does have some shortcomings I'm already seeing (some concerns about extensibility wrt adding new post metadata, but most egregiously it doesn't support embedding .gifs or even transparent PNGs, as I learned while writing this post), but it's been very quick to get set up, and has most of the core functionality I need at this point. I'd like to poke at setting up an RSS feed and... dare I even think about finding a way to allow comments (probably not, for a multitude of reasons)? The important thing is that my posts are just here in plain text, easy to read or move to any other platform at any time. Having that kind of ownership and control over my work is more important to me now than ever.

#So, really, what now?

Now? Now I see if I can stick with this, see what kinda things I feel good writing about, and hope that I can carve out a little spot for myself here on a page that's entirely mine.

If you do want to stay in touch with me directly, I still maintain a list of links on my homepage that you can find me at. Time will tell how much I get back into bigger social media sites, but I welcome chatting with new and old friends alike, so feel free to hit me up on Discord or Telegram or wherever (I hear Revolt Chat is up and coming, may look into that).

Until then!

—Mervyn