February 2026 Update

9 February 2026

I'm going to try to be quick about this one. I just realized that I've had this blog for about four years now, and haven't really done much with it. I've written about 10 pieces on a variety of subjects, but I never really achieved my main goal of pushing myself to write more in a shorter period of time, to get over the annoying Writer's Block-esque thing I have going on. Last week, with my PC-98 article, I felt a burst of inspiration that I forced myself to capitalize on, even though I was at work. I wrote basically that whole article in about a couple hours. I then spent the better part of a week figuring out how to get my site generator to display it the way I want. Along the way, I learned a bit about the code behind my site and how things work.

I want to talk about that process a little, and also maybe highlight some changes that have happened on my sites since the last update in 2023.

This Blog

While this site used to be a Zonelets site, I realized about a year ago that the software was no longer being maintained, and the developer had promoted some offshoot projects that someone with a Zonelet could use to have a more traditional SSG-like experience. I settled on Zoner, because it promised to work with the pre-existing Zonelets files I had already created. After spending a bit of time setting the new version up, I had basically the same website, except now I can write my articles in markdown, and not worry about if I'm using HTML semantic tags wrong. It seemed pretty nice, especially the built-in RSS feed generator.

But I soon realized that the Markdown implementation was not exactly on par with what I was used to seeing elsewhere, it was lacking some features that I wanted to use. It turned out, though, that to get those features to work in Zoner, I would have to go into its code, include those libraries/extensions and build the program for myself. This was a little daunting for me back in April 2025, and to be honest, I only figured it out about a week ago, after leaving it on the backburner for all those months. The Markdown processor used by Zoner is the popular .NET program Markdig, and while I'm sure it's great and fast and extensible, it wasn't something I was used to.

As an aside, I find it really annoying that a project as big and old as Markdig doesn't have useful or up-to-date documentation. The main readme is out of date, and the way to figure out how to implement the built-in extensions is to read the generated specification tests hidden somewhere in the code repository. Obviously, I figured it out, but it's not what I'm used to.

Review of Zoner

I think overall it's a pretty decent piece of software that works as advertised. Its creator, just like that of Zonelets, soon dropped development of the project, and it's been untouched since May 2021. I think that more sensible Markdig extensions could have been enabled by default, or at least give the user the option to select which ones to enable for their site.

However, I like that it works with the base Zonelets theme, philosophy and files. The RSS feed makes it easy to connet your site to your readers. The fact that Markdig does have so many useful extensions is a good thing, and for the most part, I don't have to resort to HTML to get the text effect I want.

But I think the way it handles assets is a little too rigid, building will fail if there are folders it does not expect to see, and its design almost encourages you to use your img folder as a kind of dumping ground for anything that doesn't fit its requirements. Also, building it takes between 10-15 minutes, with subsequent builds taking even longer the more Markdig extensions are enabled.

Overall, I'm happy with it, especially now that I've tweaked it to my liking. I have to consider that if I want all the user-oriented quality-of-life features like an options page, I'm subjecting myself to more code bloat, especially when the alternative involves me gaining knowledge and learning how to do something new.

Once I set up my git server, I think I'll publish my fork of Zoner with my "sensible" changes to the Markdown processor and any other small changes I make.

Setup upgrade

I think this section warrants its own post, but I'm going to give a brief overview here anyway. If you're not interested in what hardware I'm running, you have my permission now to stop reading. That is a blanket statement covering any time you access my website; feel free to leave at any moment.

isinthe.icu -- This Server

This server is the one I've had for the longest time, and I used to use it more, back when I was really starting out and playing around with my own web stuff. At this point I'm competent enought that I don't need to be paying Digital Ocean $5 a month to host it for me, but I'm lazy and old habits die hard. I have most of my public web stuff hosted here.

netsphere -- Home Server

This is the main server that hosts many of my personal services that I use on a regular basis. I won't go too much into detail here, but I've learnt a lot about networking, printing and yaml through this server.

alien.party -- Minecraft Server

I have a tiny thin client that I use to host a 4-person-at-a-time minecraft server.

PC

I've very recently switched off Windows and onto Gentoo. No complaints that I'm not used to, but it is annoying when things don't build when you want them to, and I can definitely understand how spending more time installing software than using it seems a little crazy to people. But hopefully this is something I can get around with more knowledge of my system and learning how to make it do what I want. There's a learning curve to everything, even Windows. You tend to forget about it when it's been ubiquitous for your whole life, but just because it's the "default" does not mean it's better. Granted, the installing programs thing is definitely annoying. Also, why is the GNOME project so annoying about providing binaries for their software? I don't really want to use your Flathub, at least give me build instructions. But maybe that's another thing I have to learn to get around. I bet if I actually read the code I can figure out what other software it depends on. And then I have to figure out what language it is to find out how to actually build it... Yeah build instructions seem useful here.

Wrap-Up

That's about everything I wanted to add to this site update. Yes, comments and guestbook (somehow) are still coming, once I figure out how to make sure I won't be giving too much personal info away, I will link my fedi presence. I've seen so many cool blogs in the past four years and that's really what galvanized me into getting back into writing more seriously on mine. I will try to make more frequent posts about things that I'm doing, or things that I'm reading/watching. One thing I dislike about Zoner that I forgot to mention is that there isn't a clean way to make tags or categories or folders, because having different places to write different things would be nice. But I'll leave that for future me to figure out.