True to form, I completely failed to post anything in my shiny new blog in the month of November.

I had actually started writing a post about my quest to get a perfectly functional KVM switch so I can use my work laptop and personal desktop on one desk with one set of peripherals. It's there. I wrote it. In November. I just haven't set it to Published yet, because I'm still waiting on one last pair of cables to confirm one last thing before I bitch about it too terribly much.

I'm also working on adding comments, it's just kinda slow going. Part of me wants to do them, part of me doesn't really care that much. I like the idea of them, and I want to enable that little bit of feedback, such as it is, however small my audience may be. But at the same time, I don't like the security issues surrounding them. I don't want to have to police them for robots and trolls and AI and the 1337 5kr1p7 k1dd13z who wanna try some Little Bobby Tables kinda shit. Should they be totally anonymous? Should I ask for an email address? CAPTCHA? Should I manually approve comments to be viewable? I don't know. I'm still thinking.

And at some point there are a couple other Markdown issues I need to tackle as well. The aforementioned code block light/dark thing is one. I want links in posts to pop to new windows/tabs, and they currently don't. And a couple other little minor things I noticed in one of my test posts where I was just trying out all the things.

So I have some things to do here, and some other posts sort of lined up, or at least contemplated.

Hard telling when I'll actually get them done.

I've made a minor change/fix that should now see the site in dark mode by default, unless/until you expressly choose to flip to light mode.

As originally written, the goal was to match your browser/OS theme by default. That is, if your browser/OS is in light mode, the site will initially present in light mode. If your browser is in dark mode, the site will be dark mode. And then there's a toggle switch at the bottom if you want to choose the other option.

That was the goal, anyway, but it didn't work right. It just defaulted to light mode all the time. And we can't have that, now can we?! I'll support light mode, but I won't support light mode, y'know?

Well, I decided to go back and fix it tonight. But while I was in there, I ended up deciding that (1) dark mode is superior, and (2) this is my site, I'll do what I want, so (3) I'm just going to go ahead and make it dark mode by default.

So now the site will always present to new visitors in dark mode, and if you feel so inclined, you can choose to toggle to light mode. While I was screwing around with things, I also changed the cookie name, so anyone who had previously used the toggle switch will likely need to do it again. Sorry. It was a necessary sacrifice in the name of progress. (Ok, that was a lie, changing the cookie name was entirely unnecessary and arbitrary, I just sorta also decided that I didn't like the original name I'd used, and may as well rectify that while I'm in here, too.)

Also, I fixed the stupid blade layout for the single post view. So when you click into a post, you actually get to see that post now, instead of a completely empty page. Clicking into the post doesn't really benefit you much at this point, since I haven't built comments or anything yet. But I feel like I should still at least, like, show the intended page content, instead of just a blank grey background.

Howdy. I'm Jamin. This is my blog, Se7enet.

So I've had this domain for ages. It's older than my marriage. It's been my email forever. And I used to have something here, many moons ago. It went through various iterations. Mostly all of them were a blog of some sort, or at least something reasonably similar to a blog. I think at the very beginning it was just hand-written HTML that I updated manually. Then I got into PHP and started building it in that, with better functionality, database storage, commenting, and such. Horrendous procedural PHP monstrosities that I'd be ashamed of, now, certainly. Toward the end I was using WordPress, getting themes and hacking them up or customizing them.

Then, something like a dozen or so years ago, I just sorta... stopped. Life got in the way. Kids. Work. Whatever. You know. Got longer and longer between posts. Blogs as a thing were largely over, by that point. Bigger ones still existed, and Tumblr is obviously still a thing, but the heyday of blogging just for the sake of it was definitely in the past. I never really had a large audience in the first place, so its not like I was disappointing a ton of people or anything. At any rate, I finally admitted defeat and shut the site down.

And down it has stayed. Until now! Now it's back!

We've come full circle. Well, kinda. Not all the way back to hand-written HTML, thank FSM. But we are back to my own PHP, though. This time using Laravel, which I've been using professionally for a bunch of years now. It's just a basic thing at the moment. Backend in Laravel 11, frontend in Tailwind. The admin functionality is just Filament panels. A couple Spatie packages. A sprinkling of FontAwesome. That's it. Nothing fancy. If I get any ideas in my head about new features, I'll add them as I feel so inclined. Searching and comments are probably gonna have to get built eventually, but that's Future Me's problem.

There are some issues I've noticed, but nothing I can't live with at the moment. I'll fix them as I need to. Like, the Markdown package I'm using that provides code syntax highlighting doesn't seem to support light and dark mode, it's one or the other, always. So as it sits, right now, if I make a post that has a code block in it (and I'm a programmer, so that's definitely gonna be a thing...), it would look terrible if the site were in light mode, because that one block would always render in dark mode no matter what. So I don't have a solution for that, yet. But I also don't need to make a post with a code block in it right this second, so I'm ok with putting this out there for now, and fixing it or looking for an alternative solution once I get settled in and start wanting to make code posts. Stuff like that.

I don't really know where all this will go or how long it will last or how often I'll post. No plans, really. I had a lot of fun building this site for a weekend or two, and that's about as far as I got. There's an About blurb down at the bottom of the page, it's got some of my interests in there. I'm sure most of that will show up here. I have a handful of various little "side project" ideas and experiments - mostly Laravel, but starting to get into Python and some other stuff as well. As far as actual code goes, it'll likely go on my Github (that's linked over in the sidebar, or toward the bottom of the page if you're on mobile), but I'll still talk about it here.

Alrighty, well, I suppose that's enough for tonight. Enjoy the site. More to come!