Let me paint a little timeline :
- 20XX-2015 — I did some work on the Internet under various names and with various site builders (Wordpress, Weebly). At a point, I was on Geocities.
- 2016-2017 — I started building a "name" and a "brand". I moved hosting to GitHub and used plain HTML files.
- 2017-2021 (?) — I went "all in" on
doamattoand started using Jekyll. I had a "style". At some point here, I jumped to Hugo and to Jekyll and to Next.js and probably something more that I'm missing. - 2022-2023 – I've been using Zola and enjoying it. It's not without fault, but I've been enjoying it.
Note that there is an end to that timeline. For awhile, I've been debating working on a site generator to build my websites — most of them aren't too good and I need something that I can rely on irrespective of where I need the site generator placed. So, by the end of 2023, I plan to complete a migration from Zola to my own site generator. This goal is not set in stone, but I do hope to achieve it, nevertheless.
Changing the way I build this site made me think that I should make other changes that could be breaking — I still want a smooth migration process, but baby steps, y'know ? So, here is a moderate list of changes you should be aware are going to happen sometime between now and then.
Before you read on, I want to extend thanks to those who have been with me on this crazy journey for the past 6 years (this should not make me feel old but it does). It's been a rollercoaster for us all, and that coaster is far from its end. An also important note : this is a living document. I make more changes that I'll update here. I may not. We will see.
Changes are scary, so let's start with some that I've heard for awhile :
- making the main site lighter (which is planned and mentioned below)
- adding JSON feed support (which is planned)
English is no longer the default language
This point alone is probably how you got to this page. It's the biggest breaking change I can cause — all of the pages that are on this site will end up getting prefixed by /en, technically breaking things. That's to say I will keep an English version of this site until I forget every word I know in English (ideally, never).
This means that this site will be accessible at its root (/site-refresh) in French, with pages that do have English versions (naturally, I can only do so much) being accessible at the same URL with a prefixed directory of /en (/en/site-refresh).
I have not begun language transitions yet, but I forsee this to be fairly quick. The only exception to this rule is /crepes.
The Z feed and Old Blog are going away
For awhile, I maintained a secondary blog (separate to the de facto) called "Titbits". It was basically a collection of links I found on the Internet and some opinions on them. I haven't made a new one since January 2023.
I also had a blog archive, for posts I didn't want in my main feed, but felt bad about getting rid of entirely. I might move some of the posts back into the main blog, but I likely won't. The last archived post was from June 2022.
The only copy of both will persist in Git logs exclusively.
Photobook and Sketchbook are being deprecated
Let me be 100% honest : I never really used these. I mirrored my DeviantArt profile to two sections on my site for the photos I took (/photobook) and the sketches I made (/sketchbook).
I'm removing both of these for the unforeseeable future. I'd like to keep a personal replacement for DeviantArt, but I'm not sure for now. All of the assets are still going to be on DeviantArt, but I will no longer host them through maatt.fr.
lite.maatt.fr is being deprecated
I was always a little perturbed by the bandwidth usage of my website, even though it's pretty low (3.44 Ko with compression). That, combined with living in the US which made loading my own site a bit slow (server in Iceland), made me want to have a faster, irrespective of how nominal, alternative.
I made a lite version (lite.maatt.fr) that shaved off a kilobyte. But, it has a lot of flaws :
- It's blinding white. Some of the space savings come from no light AND dark mode.
- There's no TLS, which is by design. It does technically save bandwidth. It is not worth the savings.
I plan to take what I've learned over time and build a site that's at most as big as the lite version and fix as many of the flaws as there was before.