Bitwarden Unwarranted Panic
Last weekend I started seeing a lot of people I follow either posting or boosting posts about Bitwarden no longer being open source. I did a bit of Googling and, at the time, the only news story I could find was this story from Phoronix about Bitwarden. It wasn’t quite clear exactly what was going on. I waited all week for Ars Technica to cover the issue, but unless I missed it, they never covered it. So I was confused - was this a real issue or people panicking on social media? Then I saw this video by Brodie Robertson:
TTRPG Kickstarters I've Backed
As I was looking back over my old blog posts, searching for things that needed fixing in this migration over to the Hugo static site platform, I saw that I used to write brief blog posts about the Kickstarter campaigns I was backing. Since 2013 I’ve backed somewhere around 70 or more kickstarter campaigns. Since I usually don’t back anything that involves hardware, so far I haven’t had any of the campaigns disappear without giving me what I backed. Recently I realized I had backed an inordinate amount of D&D campaigns (I tend to fall pretty deep into hobbies). So I thought I might resurrect my Kickstarter posts to follow along with the D&D campaigns I’ve backed.
Frustrations With Digital TTRPG Sourcebooks
I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).
Wordpress to Hugo Migration Process
As there are many people who are currently looking for alternatives to Wordpress in light of a little…. instability… I decided I would document my migration process. I figure my case is one of the more extreme cases, as I ran a self-hosted Wordpress instance for the past 19 years (since Feb 2005) and have ~4000 posts that needed to be migrated. I also have lots of photos, videos, and other media. Finally, I have made heavy use of many Wordpress features.
Falling Behind With Image Formats
As I’ve been exploring the move from Wordpress over to Hugo, I’ve learned that Hugo has pipelines that can run when it “compiles” the site. One such set of pipelines can automatically convert images to different formats or change the resolution of the image. They give the example of WebP and how it can potentially be smaller than a JPEG image without a perceptible loss of quality. I remember when there was a big controversy with Wordpress because after not having support for WebP for so long, they decided they were going to convert everyone’s image to WebP after upload. For image-heavy sites this could result in a large hard disk usage, so I think the conversion was left as opt-in. As I started researching, I found out that WebP is SOOO 14 years ago! The new format supported by all the browsers is AVIF. This is supposed to be every better for photographic images than WebP. But even THAT is not the newest (and supposed) best format as that would be JPEG XL. However, Google took it out of Chromium due to a “lack of desire” and since every browser but Firefox is Chromium, that’s as good as a ban on the format.
Update Your Rss Feeds
I’ve moved from Wordpress over to using Hugo to power my blog. If you’re still using RSS to follow this blog you’ll need to update your feed reader to the following URL: https://www.ericsbinaryworld.com/index.xml
A Little More on the Hugo Transition
So far, with the help of a few scripts (both bash and Python) I’ve been able to get most of the site back up to the way I want it to be. Most of the images should be working now. I still have to create and run another script for the way that this theme wants cover images to be references. I think that does bring to light one of the annoyances with Hugo vice Wordpress. When it comes to themes, each one expects things to be organized differently. It is much more chaotic than WP. Perhaps the type of person who runs Hugo is more likely to roll their own theme? Or will pick one and not change until they abandon their blog?
Moving to Hugo
I’d been thinking about moving to a static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll, or Pelican for a while now. I probably would have used them from the beginning vs a fully-fledged CMS like Wordpess had they existed back then. But the recent shennanigans with Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress were the catalyist I needed to make the move. I’m going to try it out for a while and if I don’t like it, I can always go back to Wordpress. (I haven’t deleted my content.) For now most of the images on the site will be broken until I update them to exist on Hugo.
Reflecting on a year of being the family Dungeon Master
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my brother David had introduced the kids to D&D via Muk, a module for introducing your kids to D&D. Unfortunately, it was written for an experience adult D&D player or DM to DM for the kids, so we had a few fails with my first time as the DM. Then we moved on to DnD Adventure Club. That was, and continues to be, a huge hit with the kids.
The Political Reading of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others in the series) to my kids. The podcast explores the fact that, starting around 2015, this book started to become known by conservatives as an allegory against the welfare state. While this podcast episode eventually interviews the author and confirms this was not her intention, I can certainly understand how the book could be read that way. It’s a great example of how art (literature, movies, images, music) becomes “property” of the culture once the creator releases it into the world. In many ways it doesn’t matter what the creator wanted (although I always find that fascinating), but what the culture does with it.