Year in Review: 2025

For 2024's New Year's resolution I decided I'd finally build and publish a personal website. That I'd write up my thoughts on the articles I was reading and post them instead of dumping them on friends 😆. In review, I'm happy to say I succeeded.

I wrote and published 164 blog posts over the past year, not counting this post. September was my most prolific month. I initialized the OCaml project that became the static site generator in late January, writing a test post at the beginning of February to work out frontmatter parsing, markdown generation, and my custom templating language. The first "real" post came at the end of June, a few days after I bought the domain name.

To better see the behind-the-scenes work, here's a heatmap chart of the project's git commits. Apparently I didn't actually start tracking code in git until mid-March, which I'd forgotten until now.

Writing blog posts for the site and improving its functionality have been a consistent source of enjoyment that I was honestly not expecting. I'd forgotten the pleasure of building and investing in the same thing over time. Here's a timeline of some of the major features:

• 2025-03-18 — Initial commit.
• 2025-04-07 — Enable default templates for posts.
• 2025-04-07 — Create template builtins.
• 2025-04-11 — Initial website design.
• 2025-04-22 — Add foreach template builtin.
• 2025-05-01 — Implement struct access in template system.
• 2025-06-07 — Create Github CI workflow.
• 2025-06-18 — Deploy generated site to s3-amplify.
• 2025-06-19 — Implement new site design and layout.
• 2025-06-23 — Display blog posts.
• 2025-06-29 — Add rss feed.
• 2025-07-01 — Add pageIndex (next and previous links).
• 2025-07-01 — Add pageurl builtin (insert output urls).
• 2025-07-02 — Add tags to blog posts, tag pages listing all tagged posts.
• 2025-07-04 — Add search page. Limit results, binary serialization, weighted fields.
• 2025-07-11 — Youtube embed builtin.
• 2025-07-15 — Define series, add navigation in posts from a series.
• 2025-07-17 — Add code syntax highlighting v1 (failed).
• 2025-07-27 — Add syntax highlighting v2, prism.js and code builtin.
• 2025-08-07 — Improve About page and add social icons.
• 2025-08-19 — Add open graph metadata for link previews.
• 2025-08-23 — Add external conversation (Bluesky) links.
• 2025-08-28 — Add suggested searches.
• 2025-09-07 — RSS feeds for major tags.
• 2025-09-13 — Yearly blog archives and standardize blog nav.
• 2025-09-23 — Introduce the image system.
• 2025-09-26 — Add image alt text to post search.
• 2025-09-28 — Link to high res image.
• 2025-10-09 — Create photos page.
• 2025-10-14 — Implement image placeholder colors during loading.
• 2025-12-01 — Add image pages.

There's not much of a roadmap for the site these days. It does most everything I want it to. Next year will see some changes to the site I'm sure, but I expect I'll mostly just be writing blog posts. December's been busy and stressful and I've built up a bit of a backlog of topics — expect to see more posts in January, especially on Knowledge Bases which I hope to finish up by February or March. Until then 👋.