Hello Again

It's been awhile since my last post, but I'm extremely excited to say that I'm finally ready to relaunch this site! Here's a quick update on where I've been and where things are headed here.

Good Riddance, 2020

As 2020 opened, I was in the process of relaunching this site on a new platform. Mid-2019, I had started up a WordPress-based site to chronicle my smart home and other tech adventures, but as 2019 wrapped up, I became intrigued by static site generation and soft launched a revamp of the site using a static site generator called Eleventy. Before I could finish the project and turn the soft launch into the real deal, though, the pandemic hit.

COVID-19 has been rough on all of us (I'll skip the blather about "these unprecedented times" that I'm sure we're all sick of hearing from advertisements). In terms of its impact on my smart home projects, and by association my work on this website, my work on those types of projects lagged a bit as I transitioned to working from home. As my tech tinkering space and my day job work space merged into one, it became harder to find the head space to work on personal projects in the evening after spending the day on my job in the same space. As a result, I moved my focus to working on a few hardware-related projects where I could work elsewhere in the house, but my dedication to the software side, and to the blogging side, waned for a bit.

Back in Business

Over the last couple months, though, my passion has re-ignited some. I've put together a much better home office setup and feel like I've adjusted enough to remote work life that I can better make time for personal projects after hours. And some of the work I've been doing, both on web-related projects at work and in my spare time, helped kickstart some motivation to get this site redesigned as well.

I've had to find the time here and there, with a 2-year-old and a newborn at home, so it's taken a few weeks of off-and-on work, but I'm ready to pull back the curtain on this new site. And there's much more to come.

What's on Deck

I've already got a list of posts a mile long that I've either started to write or want to write, so there's plenty of fresh content about to come your way. Having topics to write about has never been the issue, but now that I finally dug in and finished relaunching, I have a great workflow in place to write and keep the site up to date.

Home Automation is going to continue to be the main topic here. I'm looking forward to bringing you step-by-step instructions on various projects I've completed, including a few lighting projects and a major upgrade to my home server. The in-progress Smart Home 101 section will get some updates on the existing sections to bring it up to current-day recommendations, and there are three parts to the series remaining as well.

In addition, I've got a fair amount of web development content in the pipeline. I've rebuilt this site using the Svelte JavaScript front-end compiler, and a static site generator built with Svelte called Elder.js. I've been using Svelte both at work and for a personal project related to Home Assistant (more on that coming soon), and I'm absolutely enamored with its approach to front-end development. As such, I'm planning on writing more about Svelte and Elder.js in the months ahead.

That's all for now, just a quick update before I get into the meat and potatoes of some real content for the first time in almost two years. I'm glad to have you along for the ride!

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