First things first, I'll get the traditional "I've not blogged in a while" bit out the way: It's been a while since I last wrote a post on here, for a mix of reasons, either other commitments, writers block or just generally couldn't be arsed to post anything. With that out of the way...

marksuth.dev

I've spent the past month or so rebuilding this site from a fresh copy of Laravel 11, with the intention of making it a public repo for anyone that wants to, can use it and generally have a poke around. So far, I've been focused mainly on everything but the frontend, so there's probably not much noticable difference to anyone but me. I have added a new collections section, aimed at bringing together groups of things that don't fit together as a post type, or are based around a theme.

The main goal for adding collections is to bring the various lumps of data I've got stored on a multitude of other sites, such as Discogs, Untappd, Instagram, Goodreads, Letterboxd and a few others. aka owning my data. Once I've got everything added, I've got various ideas on how to go about managing things a bit more efficiently, adding filters etc. cos no one wants to scroll through 483 craft beer posts to see what I thought about an IPA I drank 7 years ago.

The next stage is to rework section I use to write and add posts to the site, making use of livewire to make the editor more intuitive depending on the type of post I'm uploading, and re-doing the CSS so it's not reliant on Bootstrap anymore. Once I've done breaking that for the next couple of months or so, I'll finally move on to updating the site theme to no longer rely on Bootstrap.

IndiePass

Contrary to what it looks like, I haven't forgotten about IndiePass, I just haven't been in the right frame of mind, or had the time to do anything on it. I'm currently sorting out some admin bits with it, and more regular updates will resume late May/early June time.

IRL

Since I last did any kind of post on here, I've been making a concious effort to generally do more, and to do the stuff I enjoy doing. From simple stuff like remembering to water my house plants, going to more gigs and live events again, to getting back into a more active and healthy routine. It's still a work in progress, and it probably always will be, but I promise I won't be turning this site into some kind of "Improve your life" influencer bullshit. If nothing else, there'll be more frequent posts in the Activity Stream bit of my site.

Cheers, Mark