I should preface this by saying I am not taking this website down or anything. If you are not bothered by all meta stuff, the takeaway is to update your RSS feed link from https://xrvs.net/en/index.xml to https://xrvs.net/index.xml. It was changed from the latter to the former previously, and I believed it did wreck the subscription for some of you (not that I believe there are that many of you), which I regretted, so I make this announcement to not make that mistake again. It will probably take at least a month or more since this post is published until I finish with the update, so take your time.
Motivation
As you can see, this website hasn’t received much updates (last post was almost a year ago), and it’s probably going to stay that way for a while. There’s a joke that there are two kinds of personal websites: one that runs on wordpress and receive weekly update, and another where there’s only two posts, first post is “I set up my website with jekyll” and the second post is “I changed from jekyll to hugo”. I am trying hard to not be the second one—I promise, these changes will not be for the sake of bikeshedding!—but well, it’s kinda hard to find something to write about when most of your time is spent at work, and talking publicly about stuff happening at work is legally risky.
So, I intend to spend more writing reviews on books and games as I read and play them. I am not satisfied with the current state of their the book reviews section. I have a list of books I read in the misc and another list with the reviews, which is a duplication. After the update, there will be one list at /reading/, with three-column kanban-esque design:
- Backlog: list of books I intend to read, maybe with a reason why I want to reador where I got recommended that book
- Currently reading: books I’m currently reading, probably with comments as I read (likely contain spoiler)
- Read: books that I finished reading, with the review.
Note that obviously, I will not update the old posts to backfill the reading log or reason I want to read a book, if they’re not already there. Game reviews will also be in this format.
The second issue with the book reviews is, I review the book in the language I read the book in. As a result, the reviews are scattered. I intend to merge the languages into one so it’d be easier to track. It’s not like I translate posts or enjoy translating them anyways, so I’ll also remove any translations that happened to be there as well. I will figure out how to add a filter for language in the RSS feed. Let me know if you’re aware of such a way.
Another improvements that I planned is the taxonomy (i.e. tags and categories). I’d like the categories to be clearly defined with a hierarchy rather than a mess it is right now—it is for this reason that I hide those from the main menu bar.
Change plan summary
- Add new list type “backlog” for books, movies, games etc
- Improve taxonomy
- Removing post translations
- Move site root from /en/ to /