2026 Mar 8 - Starting something new

I'm starting a blog

Published: 3/8/2026 | Updated: 4/4/2026

Tags: update, blog, social media, website, server

I’m actually starting a blog! I’ve considered starting one for a while, and my friend Tanya managed to push over the edge and actually start. She also managed the impossible and has convinced me to start posting to social media *shudder*.

I plan to post at least weekly, and if I have anything interesting I’m working on I will post more. Most of my planned posts are about tech and business stuff since that’s what I’m spending much of my time on right now, but I also plan to post about music, dance, and many of my other interests.

On to the weekly update!

Personal site

This week was mostly focused on re-writing my personal website in Astro and getting it ready for me to start blogging. This is the first time I’m using Astro, and I think I’m in love. Most of the stuff I have built has been on React and Next.js, which perform pretty well if you use best practices, but Astro feels like a damn Ferrari. My build times are usually less than 20 seconds (even with the React components I include), and it really feels like pages load instantly (though that is partly the magic of Vercel’s CDN as well).

Image optimization

In my quest for increased performance I finally got around to optimizing the hell out of all my photos as well, and what a difference that makes. The average photo in my portfolio is a 5 MB JPG, which is far too big to perform well on the web.

By downscaling them to 4k (longest side max 2160 pixels) and converting them to the WEBP format I got the average file size down to 174 KB. That’s a 96.5% reduction! I could have gone further and used AVIF, but a lot of my photos have smooth gradients that don’t do as well with AVIF compression, and I want some support for older browsers, so WEBP is a nice middle ground.

Reading about Vercel’s image optimization service while planning out the photography portfolio portion of my site is what inspired me to do some manual optimization. I’ve heard that some people rack up huge Vercel fees unexpectedly if they host a lot of images, so I wanted to cover my bases.

Looking into it, the image optimization thing is not going to be an issue with the scale of my personal site, but when I put together my full photo portfolio that supports image uploading, it might become an issue.

Home server

I’ve also been putting a lot of hours into preparing for my new home server setup. I’ve been running home servers for more than a decade, but always on VERY old hardware, and with mediocre networking.

Last week I found an HP EliteDesk 800 G4 with an 8th gen i7-8700 and 16gb of ram in a tower case for only $200. With all that extra power and memory I can finally host all the services I want in a nicely configured Docker network, and still have enough power left over for all the Minecraft servers I can currently barely run.

I’m also going to cannibalize my old gaming graphics card so it can handle real time transcoding for media streaming, image classification in Immich, and a VERY small LLM for auto-tagging bookmarks in Karakeep. I plan to make blog posts about most of the stuff I’m self hosting, so keep an eye out for that. I already made one about writing a browser plugin to modify the UI of Karakeep.