With the demise of Twitter/X I've decided to get back to plain old blogging again. To do that right, I've dusted off my old personal blog here at andrewburke.me.
It's an old codebase, last updated several years ago, and as is always the way with these kinds of things, it didn't work anymore and wouldn't deploy properly. This is a Ruby on Rails app, and while Rails has always been breathtakingly smooth and efficient on the server side, its front-end asset compilation has been a hot mess for well over a decade now. When I saw that my nearly JavaScript-free Ruby site using plain old CSS was getting errors because a Node-sass compiler couldn't find the right version of Python (Python?!) I decided it might be easier to just start again from scratch. At least it's a simple site, and this gave me the chance to make it even simpler. It still had some weird deployment issues on Heroku with Webpack and NodeJS's openSSL implementation - but since this new site has basically no JavaScript at all, hacking my way around it was fine.
So here it is. It's very basic and will probably get tuned up some more over time, but it's good to be back on my own home on the internet, not owned by any erratic billionaires.
The icon on my phone's Twitter app turned into an 'X' yesterday, so I relegated it to a back page, and have said goodbye to it for now, after nearly 15 years of curation and connection. I'm still active on Mastodon, Threads, Instagram, and Facebook (see the contact page) - but I'm going to try to have most of the real action happen here.