Updates to my website

2021-08-20

391 words, ~3min reading time

During the last days I took some time to review and update my website and---while I am at it---also slightly changed some other things. Since there are two thing that may interest you, I decided to write few words about it.

What I Use

In early 2016 I wrote a blog post about what software I use from day to day, motivated by questions from some people. Since then I regularly (meaning around once a year (boy, there is really some outdated stuff there)) updated the post, extending, re-working and updating it. During the last months I saw some other people having a dedicated page on what hard- and software they use and I decided that this would possibly also something for me. So I sat down and created a What I Use page which replaces and extends the old post. It now also features the various hardware that I have lying around. Of course I will also update that page more or less regularly (I added a note on top when it was last updated).

Engage!

Next to a few design tweaks I also better highlighted the possibility to comment on my posts. This follows a great idea I read on the Blog of Kev Quirk to use a button for engaging readers to write their thoughts by email. When I moved from Wordpress (where I used the build in commenting system) to this Hugo based site I no longer had a way for readers to comment on posts As an alternative I put a really small text at the end of each post telling people to write me comments by email (I think I had this idea from Karl Voit). However: I never got any email on my posts (OK, admittedly I do not post much and following the stats there are also not much readers...).

What Kev does is a bit more advanced: while he also follows the idea of not having a commenting system but engaging the readers to write him a mail, he has a much better UX for that. At the end of each post he puts a highly visible button labeled with "Reply via email". I like the idea very much and decided to implement the same approach on this page. So feel free to send me your thoughts by mail using the nice button below!