Site update April 2023

It's been a while since I posted on this blog. Let's go over why that is the case, what I've updated about the site and what I plan for the future.

Why haven't I made a new post for so long?

There's a few reasons for that, actually.

The biggest reason is... life. It's been a busy few years for me. I've had a number of big projects for university, did an internship, graduated, and got my first full-time job.

This brings me to the second and third reasons: A lack of time and a lack of interesting projects to write about. Due to me being so busy with other things, my hobbies have slowed down a bit. The few things I worked on are very simple repairs or restoration of common consoles/accessories like the Game Boy, Game Gear, PS2, controllers, etc.

Now that things have settled a bit more, I find myself having a bit more time again, hence why I decided to pick up blogging again.

The site redesign

The old version of this site was written entirely in plain HTML, CSS and PHP. This meant that for every article or change I wanted to make, I had to manually write all the code by hand. While that gave me maximum control over everything, it was also very time consuming. Which in turn made it a bit demotivating to write new posts.

However, this has now been fixed! I switched over to a proper CMS. After testing a few options, I decided to go with Ghost. It's modern & fast, has a very simple & clean interface with many options for customization and makes writing posts very quick and easy. All the repetitive tasks I had to do by hand for each post are now automated. The blog now runs entirely in Docker containers on a new, more powerful Unraid server I built a few months ago.

Of course, you, the reader, will also benefit from this upgrade. Pages and images should load much faster now. There's now a built in image viewer which allows you to view images in detail without being redirected to a new tab like on the old site. And lastly, everything has a more modern look and should be more mobile-friendly.

What about the future of this blog?

To be honest, I'm not entirely certain about that yet. But I do have a few goals.

When I first started this blog, my main motivation was to create my own space to post information that might be useful to others. I also wanted a dedicated spot for all the information about the Philips BO prototype.

I've made a few posts like the ones about the €2 NES or XBOX controller that were fun to make, but didn't exactly contribute anything new or particularly interesting. I want to make it a goal to only post about retro items that are genuinely interesting (in my opinion) or items that are not often talked about. There are already more than enough articles/videos/etc about repairing or restoring Game Boys, NES consoles and the likes.

Conclusion

In short, I want future posts to always be about something unique and/or fun for both me and the readers. There may be long gaps between posts, but when I do end up posting something, I'll make sure that it will be worth your time.

As always, thank you for reading!