The Introduction (After 10 Years)

Monday, 01 July 2024 arrow_back_ios arrow_forward_ios

Wow, it has been a while since I did this, huh.

Welcome welcome, I'm not doing any cryptic paragraph characters over here now, that was a joke for yesterday and if you came to the right place... You did it!

As to why the address (if you can see it) doesn't have a "blogspot" domain, and how there is a prompt to install this website (it's called a PWA) and how everything is as snappy even though it's slower the first time... We will have a lot to talk about all this and how I am moving forward from here.

Over the past few years as I took up web development at work, I also learnt to enhance the experience on my blog over time, and somehow, through many years and iterations, I've learnt to process the Blogger blog export files and create a whole new static site out of it! Yeah, it's as what you see now, but it's not without limitations. But I have overcame most of them, enhanced the content for more than I have asked for, and effectively created a backup of what I've written this past decade.

With regards to why Blogger is a problem though, almost everything is not worth mentioning anymore. They may have a great editor to boot, and thank goodness they never charge us for anything from this years long blogging service not even the uploading of images which is the backbone of this blog now, but the new themes are way harder to edit using JavaScript making it harder to maintain over time just with minor changes, and most importantly, you cannot import the blogger backup file without encountering into more issues than if you did not do anything to your old blog. I have done that before 5 years ago to much success but even that is quite a stretch. So yeah, this isn't just a haphazard decision, it was just Blogger forcing me into a corner.

And trust me, I did try WordPress, but that didn't work. Then again, I'm glad I didn't because unlike Blogger, WordPress deals with custom HTML code and that will be a pain to export when the time comes where I want to host this myself, which I am doing now.

THE CHANGES

As such, the plan going forward is to self host an export of a Blogger blog, separating post creation and hosting to different entities. Hopefully this will not screw me over at some point, we can but hope, but this will be what I will be using now. Thanks, Render.

Apart from the major change of hosting service still dependent of the same blogging platform, everything else besides the posts themselves had to be customized, from the pages, to creating a sitemap of archives, to allow global blog search... All this, had to be done by myself. This was a lot of effort over the years, but I'm glad to say that I've done all of them without much issue, but with more effort than I would have expected, creating links to archives as far back as posts in 2017.

Also changed is the title of this blog. Because I wanted to refresh this but ended up, even with the help of generative AI, were not able to innovate to what this mess of a blog here means in a summary, so I ended up making the title shorter. This will make it more true to character yet generic calling all of them "reports" since, you know, how do I even group all of the stuff I am doing here today? Speaking of these though...

WHAT THE REPORTS ARE

I don't think everyone will be keen on this, so I'm keeping this as a special segment lol. Each of the labels used will represent something "I want to report" on, on schedule or as and when it happens.

The Statement - "I have something to reflect on"
The Entertainment News - "I consumed entertainment content this week"
The Dreams - "I dreamt of something worth remembering"
The Fanfiction - "I imagined a tale of fictional me with women I like"
The Everyday Life - "I have something about life I want to highlight"
The Welfare Package - "I bought stuff from Japan I want to showcase"
The Klassic Note - "I have something on music to focus on sharing"
The Review - "I reviewed a product with my compliments"

Some will overlap for organization purposes, and Everyday Life is essentially what I want to put as my life now (being a Japanese voice actress otaku lmao), so don't mind me if I change these labels from time to time to reflect on how I view my content in the future.

THE WRITING STYLE

I write for myself, first and foremost. And I have found one single opinion recently to back my stance: Writing is thinking first, communication second.

My pace for writing is always lengthy and unorganized just as my English teachers have mocked me for my sentence structures for my English making me super aware of them, but not like that and my other grammar mistakes have stopped me from typing as fast as I have learned typing when I was a kid. As such, you may see hard to read paragraphs (I'm not going to pad the line height just so it gets longer), expressions and emojis here and there because a picture speaks a thousand words, and don't ask which generation lol I am you can figure out just by reading this post. *giggles*

Never will you see me being formal (even in music reviews I was rather casual in recent years) in writing in any way; I've always done many things for myself, and this is just an extension of not bottling them up and talking to myself until my mom wants to call a psychiatrist (mom it's ok it's letting my heart out to not you who don't care *silence*), but in recent years this haven has essentially turned into whatever I want to write. As such, I will not preach on assistive technologies and I explicitly mean generative AI (thumbnails excluded) because I still like writing with the (dumb monkey) human touch, I don't brag about any of my posts on social media because I need acceptance from the public (apart from Klassic Note Reviews mainly to promote their works), and I actually spend a lot of time on every single post I do even if it is just looking at a book worth of photos. *wink*

THE IMPROVEMENTS GOING FORWARD

I am creating as many features of a blog that should have been in one that Blogger does or doesn't support, including:

New web components that enhance content delivery
(Designed by yours truly, for example, the labels paragraph)
Full PWA support for static sites
(It has its limitations but now you can read my stuff in the lift)
Material 3 layout and color themes support
(This will require redesign but I'll try; I like Google design languages ever since my first smartphone the Nexus 5, so I shall pick up on some of them and implement it on not Blogger)

Posts-wise, I'm moving forward placing new standards here and there so I won't regret having to fix every other post to upgrade their capabilities (and yes, I did spend the past year doing so):

All posts will now require a thumbnail, even for this introductory post so I can actually make posts render properly on the homepage;
Reviews of weekly Anime episodes in The Entertainment News will be shorter (hopefully) as I (1) continue to prevent myself from stopping to take notes and (2) use social media like Bluesky to post my minor opinions. I will instead gear towards doing an overall summary just like how I did it a decade ago;
Klassic Note segment in The Entertainment News will be changed to a bullet list of news/items reviewed, and I will have a paragraph afterwards of my opinion in case you really don't care about the latter;
(More to come...)

So TL:DR; I'm just moving this blog's domain and it's a new one in a decade, Blogger will host images and editing of posts itself while I leverage on its export feature to build my own static site to host. This new blog will be put to the test once I start with posts this week including Entertainment News with a new format (hopefully lol) and especially up next, we have a snippet of words I think you (talking about you, me) might be interested in to kickstart the new Fanfiction series.

If no one is particularly invested in this transition to a new era of my blog, I do. And that's good enough. *thumbs up*

See you on the next post.