Good News and Bad News
I have done some improvements I can, which is still not enough.
This will be the last site-related post for the foreseeable future.
As you might be able to see (I hope), I have made a few viisual changes. I’ve added a real bio. I’ve also added the only social accounts I have — Mastodon, YouTube, and Twitch — as icons at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. The banner is nothing special, since I suck at design, but I got to use ArcBrush for a “real project” and after some trial and error managed to create that affront to art you see at the top of the page. That’s the good news.
The moderate news is that I won’t be moving my domain for a few weeks. My wife and I are heading back to Ireland in a little over a week, this time for two weeks, and I have email addresses associated with my scopique.com domain that I don’t want to be without, just in case. The good news is that my current WordPress host has my nameservers, but my domain is still with my registrar so I should be able to either get everything back under my registrar and redirect the base URL here, or I could move my DNS to CloudFlare or other provider. That will be my plan when I return.
The bad news is that I can’t change my comment system. I am being penalized for switchinig to Astro on GitHub Pages. Astro is designed to incorporate interactive Javascript/Typescript elements during development, but when the site it compiled for the push to the host, those interactive elements are “frozen” at the time the site is built. The result is static code which has very little opportunities for interaction — not none, but because Pages is little more than a web server that sends out text to your browser, I can’t do things like run Node back-end services that might process comments. Bottom line is that unless I use a third-party off-side service like Disqus or one of a literal few that want to charge me to host my comments In The Cloud, I’m stuck with the Giscus (GitHub Discussion) comment system.
I suppose this would be a good time to remind people that discussions on the website are good to keep conversation centered around a post, but for me, real discussion happens in the moment, like on Gamepad.club where I am available as a Real Live Person for most hours of the day. I am far more apt to interact with people through Gamepad than I am through comments, which is a wink and a nudge way of saying that if you feel moved to leave a comment and have or want to have a GitHub account (they’re free, and you can use other single sign-on providers like Google or whatnot), please find me at Gamepad.club, available through the link at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar.