2025-09-30 19:10:00

After flip-flopping about what I'm going to do with this site, I decided to flip to Jekyll and build my own little CMS while I'm at it. Because why not? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Yup, I’m back on Jekyll, folks. RSS subscribers will have received a load of “new” posts dumped into your RSS reader from me (sorry). As a result, a couple of people have reached out to see what I’m up to, so here’s my explainer. 🙃

Regular readers will know that I’ve been thinking about simplification for some time now, but I’ve always been torn between the convenience of a CMS, and the performance/simplicity of an SSG.

After lots of deliberation, I narrowed it down to a couple of options:

1. Keep Kirby and rip out some of the complexity.
2. Switch to an SSG and have a static workflow in Obsidian.

But, me being me, I ended up going with option 3:

Switch to an SSG AND build my own (simple) CMS.

And you know what, dear reader? I did that and it’s bloody brilliant. I’m actually writing this very post in my little CMS (dubbed Hyde because, you know, Jekyll & Hyde). Here’s some screenshots of what it looks like:

Hyde homepage

Existing posts list

The post editor window

The beauty of having Hyde as my CMS is not only that it works exactly how I want it to work, but it also removes content from the rest of the site. Within Hyde all I can do is load and edit content; I cannot do anything with the design, layout, or features of the site. My hope is that this will encourage me to write more and fiddle less. We’ll see.

It also means that there’s no Git CI/CD workflow getting in the way of things. I have a simple DEPLOY button that runs a Jekyll build and rsync’s any changes to my server. A build and deploy takes around 5 seconds in total.

Hyde is PHP based and runs locally, so no security issues or complexity is introduced, either. Publicly, it’s all just HTML, CSS and a tiny bit of JS. Lovely.

I’ve written a bash alias so when I type hyde in my terminal, it runs the local PHP server for Hyde, and starts my Jekyll server too. So I have everything I need for my little CMS, including previews, before I hit DEPLOY.

I’m really please with how Hyde is coming along. Sure there are still bugs and things I’d like to tweak, but it’s 90% there now, and as a result, writing this post has been just as nice as writing a post in Kirby.

Why switch?

That’s a great question, dear reader, and there are a couple of reasons for my switch. Firstly, why not? It’s fun and I enjoy doing this stuff, and that’s all the reason I should need really. But there are other reasons.

As I said in my previous post, the Kirby site was starting to creek with all the complexity I’d added, so things kept slowing down, crashing, and just being annoying.

I’d just like to point out that this is in no way the fault of Kirby, but rather my own (very shitty) coding skills. Kirby is fantastic and you should definitely consider using it for your site.

Secondly, my host (Ionos) recently announced that they’re doubling the cost of my VPS because they can no longer pass on a free Plesk license to their customers, so the incentive was there to find a lighter host too.

I have another month or so before the costs go up, so will work on moving this site over to a CDN host, like Bunny, I think.

As a result of going back to a static site, I’ve decided to forego some of the more complicated features that this site had. For example, the guestbook, watch log and various stats pages are all gone (I might bring back stats in the future though).

Notes have gone too. Instead, I’m just gonna use my Micro.blog site as my notes site, and will post via the Micro.blog app - much more simple.

Final thoughts

I’m super proud of how Hyde has turned out - it’s a great little CMS that is customised to my needs, and gives me just what I want and no more. It also abstracts content and site away from one another, so I can get on with writing and not be tempted to fiddle.

Right, that’s it. I’m gonna hit the DEPLOY button and hopefully you lot should see this post in a few seconds…

2025-09-22 00:50:00

Took me a little bit to finish this one. Even though it’s a short book, I’ve been super busy and have been too tired to read in the evenings.

Anyway, it’s another great book and I continue to enjoy this series, especially as I’m starting to fine Murderbot more engaging. As Joel commented recently, the chapters are really long, sometimes taking me over an hour to read. Which can be annoying as I prefer shorter chapters as they allow me to only pick up a book for a few minutes if I want.

All that said, I continue to really enjoy this series.

2025-09-20 23:15:00

I published a post about simplifying this site recently, I've made some changes, but I don't think I've simplified much.

The previous post was a bit of a whinge about me logging into the amazing Kirby panel, getting side tracked and ending up tweaking stuff instead of actually writing content. Me being the sausage that I am, my potential solution was a switch to a static site generator, like 11ty.

I sat down to think about this properly and I realised that I didn’t need an SSG, what I needed was a workflow for publishing content that’s separate from the Kirby panel. Now, the great thing about Kirby is that it’s all plaintext files under the hood, so I could just write posts in something like Obsidian, but Kirby’s format is awkward to write in and I’d lose all the markdown secret sauce that Obsidian offers.

Here’s an example of what a plaintext Kirby post looks like:

I’d much prefer to write in good old Markdown with some frontmatter, just like you SSG folk do. But that’s not supported by Kirby; quite the quandary, dear reader.

Obsidian to the rescue (kinda)

I decided to roll my own thing and wrote an Obsidian plugin that allows me to export a markdown file with frontmatter, to Kirby’s plaintext format.

This allows me to not only publish posts like I’m using an SSG, but over time it will mean I also have a markdown version of all my content. So if I did want to move, it would more simple.

I’ll probably write a script to export all my current content to .md format at some point.

I’ve even made sure that my little Kirby Export plugin also supports my custom post types, like Books, Links and Notes. I’m really pleased with how it turned out. So much so that I’m writing this very post in Obsidian and I have to say, it’s very nice.

Other changes

One thing I did want to do to simplify things, is have my notes mushed in with all the other content on this blog. Before, books, links and blog posts were on the homepage, but notes were on their own on a separate page.

I wanted my homepage to be a stream of consciousness for everything I publish. So I mushed them all together and changed the design slightly, so other post types look a little different than notes. I think it came out looking pretty good:

I created a few templates in Obsidian so I can dump them into a new markdown file and away I go - it makes getting started with a new post really simple.

Deploy script

I use Git as the backbone of my site. I have a local copy, and I deploy changes to my site as needed. To allow me to not have to go into the Kirby Panel to pull new changes that I push to the server, I wrote a little script that commits and pushes local changes to GitHub, then logs into my server via SSH and pulls changes.

So now, not only can I produce content within Obsidian, I can also deploy those changes to my site with a single command. I’ve been writing notes like this for a few days now and it works really well - so much so that it’s quickly becoming muscle memory. It goes something like this:

• CTRL+N => New note.
• CTRL+P => Insert template.
• Write the post…
• CTRL+P => Export to Kirby.
• CTRL+P => Deploy.

So I don’t need to take my hands away from the keyboard, or move outside of Obsidian for the entire process of creating and publishing my content.

Pretty. Bloody. Cool.

Comments & Webmentions

While I was making changes, I decided to add a comments section below all post types, using Maurice’s fantastic Komments plugin. I also installed and configured his IndieConnector plugin so this site now supports Webmentions (I think - I haven’t been able to test that, so we will see).

I’ve battled with both comments and the IndieWeb in the past, and neither ended well. So I’m not sure if these changes will stick, but I figured it was worth trying for a while. I can easily revert them if they get annoying.

Final thoughts

I know all this is adding complexity to the site, and my aim here was to simplify, but I want to see how the comments thing goes with Kirby.

To actually simplify, I do plan on pulling some features out. Namely the Watch Log, and potentially the Guestbook too. But again, we’ll see - I don’t want to make too many changes in one go.

For now, I’m happy with the changes I’ve made. I’m not sure if this new content creation process will stick for me, or if it’s just a fad. If it is a fad, I can always revert to my old way of producing content in the Kirby Panel. But if it sticks, I have a nice halfway-house between an SSG workflow, and a great CMS panel when I need it.

TL;DR - Kirby + Obsidian = ❤ …I hope.

2025-09-14 17:35:00

This site’s a fun playground, but it’s evolved into a cluttered maze. Lately I’ve been wondering if it’s time to strip it down so I can focus on writing.

Since moving this blog over to Kirby a couple years ago, I’ve added a lot of features. Prior to the move, it was a simple site that had a blog, an RSS feed, and a handful of pages. But since then, I’ve been learning a bit of PHP and this site has morphed into a playground for my online antics. As a result, I’ve added:

• A notes system.
• A guestbook.
• A blogroll with an automatically generated OPML file that you can download.
• Custom post types that include blog, links, books, watches, and goodness knows what else.
• Stats for both my blog posts and my notes.
• A log of which watches I wear, along with stats.

Under the hood I’ve built a number of custom plugins, routes, hooks, configs etc. It’s a lot, and I struggle to keep up with all the things I’ve done at this point.

By some people’s measure, this isn’t that complicated. But for a hobbyist like me, this is really bloody complex and as a result things are starting to creak. For example, I’m now having to reboot my server once a month or so, because something (I don’t know what) is causing it to shit the bed.

It also means that I’m spending more time fiddling and less time writing, which is shame because it’s what I love to do. If you look at the stats for this site, you will see a big drop off in 2025, which coincides with me starting to learn PHP and fiddling more.

What shall I do?

My first thought was to burn it all down, simplify the whole thing and re-write it in something like 11ty. No PHP, no complexity, just a simple blog, RSS feed and a few pages again.

But I love Kirby and honestly, I think I’d miss the CMS too much if I got rid of it. But then, on the other side of the coin, Kirby is what’s causing me to fiddle so much.

• Do I go to an SSG like 11ty?
• Do I keep the CMS and go with something like Ghost?
• Do I just strip a load of the functionality out of this existing site?

I’ve been thinking about this for months, and I can’t make up my mind. I know I want to get back to writing, but every time I login to this site, I end up getting side-tracked on something I want to fix, change, or improve. It’s a slippery slope.

I’ve been using Obsidian for notes for a while now, and I love it. I could turn it into a slick SSG publishing machine…but I’m not sure if I want to open that can of worms, either.

Gah, I dunno. I think I’m going to spin up a simple 11ty site and see if I can build a decent workflow around Obsidian, then go from there…

2025-09-02 23:30:00

Another short book in this series and I’m really enjoying it. Being so short, they don’t feel like books, more like long chapters. But I’m becoming more invested in The Murderbot and I’m looking forward to starting book 3 this evening.

ART is definitely my favourite “character” in this book. I thought the dynamic of Murderbot and his sidekick (a ship!) is really novel.

The entire series (and other Martha Wells books) are still available on Humble Bundle. So if you’re interested, go and nab them quick!

2025-08-31 00:15:00

I bought All Systems Red back in November 2023 but never got around to reading it, as there was always something else I fancied more.

At around 150 pages, it’s a quick read, and I finished it over a couple of evenings before bed. Because of the brevity, the story wastes no time getting started and needs to hook you right away. It did.

My only frustration is that I wish it had been a little longer, with more space to explore certain details. I am not sure why Martha Wells keeps these novellas so short, but I’ll take “too short” over endless padding.

There are eight books in The Murderbot Diaries, and buying them all adds up. Together, they are about the length of a single Brandon Sanderson epic, yet each novella is priced roughly the same as one of his full-length novels.

That said, I love a good yarn, and I am happy to support authors I enjoy. Especially when the eBook ends with a note like this:

At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

I will definitely be picking up the next one.

MKJ and Xinit, over on that there Fediverse just let me know about the entire series (and some other Wells books) available on Humble Bundle, so I’ve just snagged them all.