Site Update

As returning visitors may have noticed, the site has changed for better or worse with a few new sections in the past month or so. Notably:

• Book Recommendations: random non-fiction books I liked and would recommend for anyone interested in computer science
• Blog: My long form content that I have been maintaining from my former blogsite. Hopefully I resolved all the issues when it comes with migration including photos and internal links
• Archives for µBlog as it was getting a bit too overwhelming to display all the micrblogs in one giant page
• UI Changes: With the help of AI (I am bad at colors), I increased the contrast and outlined links to be more obvious. Lately, I’ve been enabling limited contrast mode at home and at work as I find it easier to navigate so I did the same on this website.

As to why I made these changes, it’s not for a good reason … I am just procrastinating from preparing for my language exam … Ironic how I signed up for the exam in hopes I would study more seriously but alas I just procrastinate by doing other things. Anyhow, it’s a nice edition to the site.

Below are some examples of the visual UI changes on the site:

Before:

Now:

Before:

Now:

On another note, I have decided that maintaining two separate sites to be a burden and it also made my blog look dead. Therefore, for now on, both neocities and my blog will get both updates and are now effectively mirrors of each other. Actually in fact my current blog will be sunsetting soon as it now has a new link.

Over the years, I have changed where I hosted my blog and websites which can be a bit cumbersome for people to follow me. Thus I now have bought the domain name randombits.ca in hopes that visitors will no longer need to follow my new link every few years. But who knows if I’ll keep this domain name for years to come. Only time will tell. At the moment the url directs visitors to my codeberg page but it is a mystery to me as to why trying to visit the mirror via the usual codeberg page link directly (i.e. user.codeberg.pages) does not display the right content but that’s fine for now. It’ll probably fix itself in due time and in the event I migrate once again to another hosting provider, I can fix it then so I can have 3 mirrors as opposed to one. I love redundancy :) It does make monitoring traffic much more difficult but I try my best to avoid monitoring stats for my mental health anyways. On another note, I do know a few folks having trouble visiting neocities due to their browser telling them it’s unsafe. I am not sure as to why but it could be their ISP providers telling them this. I recall having a video call with someone in Indonesia a year or two ago whose browser was complaining about it. If I have multiple mirrors, perhaps this would not be an issue for them as they could simply try another server. Perhaps I’ll revive my Github account and have it act as another mirror.

There are two potential concerns I have with merging my microblog and my other blogsite:

1. People will now see any potential chaotic content I may be posting on my blogsite which was geared to be more professional. In the past I indicated that neocities was my place to write random things that may not be a good fit for my other website. Well that no longer applies anymore as the sites are merged.
2. Merging two websites means a lot more storage. I was in a pleasant surprise that neocities is quite generous with their storage limit of 1GiB, plenty enough for me. This amount may not be sufficient in the far future but that’s a problem for the future me. There’s also an issue with what file types I can upload in neocities. I would need to be a paid subscriber to upload certain file types and even then, it’s not open to all file types.

I have no qualms paying for the subscription for a year or two to return the service for what neocities has provided me. But I don’t think that would be a viable long-term solution considering I could rent a cloud instance for about the same price with more capabilities. I recognise that hosting is not cheap nor does it scale linearly so it is my intention to eventually buy a Neocities pro member in a year time from now once I graduate university and get a job. Sadly I cannot go straight to masters as I don’t simply have the funds to justify spending another tens of thousands of dollars. I already spent a lot doing a 2nd undergraduate degree for fun … a very bad financial decision.