My lack of blogging recently has bothered me. Part of it was that I was a little burnt out. I just had very little to talk about. But there was something else. Around that same time Umami decided to go to version 3.0. For those of you who don’t know, Umami is a Google Analytics alternative that is self hostable and privacy focused. The problem is, the new update is garbage. The new UI is unintuitive an requires more work to get around to stats you’d like to see.

I was so close, y’all. I promised myself that I would blog every day from mid-September to the end of the year. But I’ve failed. I wanted to write yesterday, but I had nothing to write about. Same with today. It’s not like I have no ideas, but nothing that I’m motivated to actually take up.

I’ve learned a few things during this process. First, forcing it is a bad idea. Most times I did fine, but there were several times where I just did not want to blog but forced one out anyway. It never felt good nor did those blog posts turn out well.

First off, Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends. Second, yes, this post is being written on turkey day, despite being time stamped the day before. I’m not cheating, I’m adapting. Or so I tell myself.

I spent most of today cooking for family. We did Thanksgiving meal really odd this year. We had so many things we wanted, we started cooking on Sunday. We’ve been eating stuff all week. All we have left to cook is the bird itself and some potatoes. So we’ve had part of the dinner already, and then leftovers, and then we’ll cook some more and then have more left overs. It was good in that we didn’t have to do everything all at once, but it also feels very odd. Every day this week has felt like Thanksgiving.

This is my 200th post in 2025. There’s still over a month to go in this year, so I’ll have more. When I started this blog, it was going to be nothing but books. I wanted a place where I could talk about books I’ve read, what I was going to read, and other book related things.

If you go all the way back, which you can do by going to my Archives Page, you’ll see the first few posts are all about the books. And for sure, I’ve written a lot about reading this year. But I’ve escaped that niche and this has turned into a blog about whatever I want to talk about. It has been freeing in a way I didn’t really think was possible when I set out. And as time goes on, I discover more and more things I really love about blogging.

I have been publishing a new post every day since mid September. I’ve had a good time doing it, and I’m going to continue on into next year unless something happens. But I do have to wonder, does publishing too much bug those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed? Do the people who post four or five times a day, usually short posts, come across as spammy? Is there such a thing as too many posts?

So, for the last few months, I’ve used Hyvor for the comments on this blog. This was after trying a few times to get it right with free and open source options. I like Hyvor a lot, but it has one HUGE problem: it’s expensive. And I’m not talking like 30 bucks a year, it’s 140 bucks a year. That’s absurd for a blog commenting system, at least for a small blog that only a handful of people will ever even want to comment on.

If you look at the end of this post, you’ll see that I now have something new on my site. I can now assign a blog post to a series, and it will put a series map at the end of the post. It really just uses something similar to tags to do this, but it will allow me to create groups of posts that were written in series about a certain topic. In this case, it will be Blog Updates.

So, when trying to come up with a topic for today, I had several in mind. One thing I’ve taught myself to do, however, is check my Archives page to ensure I haven’t written about a topic before.

Now, I don’t see anything wrong with talking about a topic more than once. Goodness knows, I’ve talked about notes on this blog a lot. But I don’t want to basically write the same blog post over and over and over again. So I always check.

I’ve had some blog stats available on my About page for a while, but I wanted to see if I could make my script a little more robust. For one, I wanted more stats, but I also wanted graphs.

What I had before was a simple bash script that would post the total number of posts and the total word count. Every time I would publish a post, Hugo itself would run the script and output to a shortcode. It was janky and didn’t really count things accurately.