Site Updates for the New Year

I have a brand new How to Follow Me page with several ways you can keep up with my posts. Some of this information was already scattered across the site or discoverable by the more geeky crowd, but now it’s accessible to all on a dedicated page.

Included on that page is a pretty big update: you can now subscribe to get my posts by email! I wanted to keep the signup simple and avoid spam, so I decided to set up a passwordless system. When you enter your email address, you are sent a temporary, unique link that will sign you in when you click it. Once signed in, you can choose if you want to subscribe and select the frequency of the newsletter. You can optionally enter your name/nickname to customize the newsletter and welcome message on my site.

Setting that up got me thinking about privacy. It is really important to me that people understand I won’t spam them. I have also wanted to document how people’s public interactions from other sites might appear here via webmention, so I decided to set up a privacy policy page. I reviewed other indieweb examples of privacy policies to help me set that up. I am not a lawyer, but I tried to cover the basics as clearly as possible without legalese.

For quite a while, my site has had two main sections: the homepage for articles (blog posts) and the notes page for all the other types of content (short posts, photos, bookmarks, likes, etc.). Most people may not even be aware of the notes section unless they spend time exploring. I have started to update the homepage so it will feature more of the things I post. Articles will still be featured there, especially while they are relatively new, but so will all the other posts. This will have the advantage of my site not looking really inactive when it’s been 16 months between articles, as happened in 2020–2021. As part of these updates, I have set up a new feed so you can subscribe to all posts. There are now feeds for: all posts, articles only, notes only, and photos only. These are all linked from the How to Follow Me page.

On the homepage, I also moved the author card from the bottom to near the top. I figured it would be more welcoming, especially for first-time visitors who have no idea who this gRegorLove person is. I updated the short bio and the photo in that author card. Next up, I need to update the longer bio on my about page, since it is getting really old.

Finally, I added back my photo in the footer of individual posts. This lets my older posts show the photo I was using at the time instead of always showing my current photo from the homepage. For example, this post shows my previous photo.

It feels really good to finally be announcing these updates. I am inspired to keep making improvements to the site and am hopeful that the refreshed homepage will inspire me to write more often.