Life Update and a Fresh Coat

Going to just jump right into it: we’re expecting our second daughter in just a couple of months! I’m all abuzz and excited to find out who she’s going to be. We’re really in the thick of it right now getting ready.

While that has been keeping me busy, I’ve also been extremely busy with work. I’m in a new role and it’s been non-stop, while also taking on work on the side to try to make ends meet (ends are incredibly hard to make meet in Santa Cruz, CA).

On top of that, and very frankly, I’ve been dealing with pretty heavy anxiety in the last several months. Probably partially because of how busy everything is. I’m working on it as best as I can.

Anyways, for those reasons and more, I’ve somewhat neglected this blog. So I put in some effort over the past few weeks to revamp it a little bit. Here are some changes:

A new look.

Over the weekend, I updated my site to a new theme. This is one of Ghost’s built-in themes, Journal (with a few tweaks of my own, such as dark mode support).

I chose this theme because it’s text-forward. I don’t love how many of the default themes have heavy emphasis on the featured images that are attached to posts. I love taking photos, but the purpose of this site is to be a blog, which is mostly writing!

I’m hoping this will make it a little easier for me to quickly compose and post updates here.

Inboxes.

I added the ability to subscribe to my site via email! I haven’t fully decided how I want to do this yet, whether it will send an email for every new post, or if I’ll do a quarterly round-up of what’s been going on in my life. I kind of like the latter option. If you’re interested, sign up!

Conversations.

Part of setting up the email list is that this site now supports commenting! Anyone can sign up with an email and password and comment on any of my posts, including this one.

Tidied up.

I cleaned house a bit: un-publishing nearly 700 posts that were “micro” posts. For context, I migrated to this site from Micro.blog, which had a very different style of posting. All of those posts up to the migration are available at micro.davidcs.net, and any old links will redirect automatically.

It was actually a ton of fun putting up that Micro site, which I used Hugo + Netlify for. Super duper easy. I could see myself getting into using that as a separate feed for bite sized updates. But for now I’ll continue to do longer stuff here and shorter stuff over on Mastodon and Bluesky.

What else is new... oh, I received a Nintendo Switch 2 as a birthday gift. If you have one and want to play Mario Kart sometime, be my friend!

That’s about it. Have a good one. ✌️