This title is fairly to the point. The bill has come due for this domain name and I am faced with the guilt of not using it to the fullest.

This is not for lack of ideas. I want this to be a place for the writing I do not necessarily want next to my CV, a podcast with friends, the music I make, and anything else that comes to mind. So why is its content limited to the rare post?

I think that the difficulty of updating is a main issue. I switched to Proxmox about a year ago and prior to that this gemlog/blog ran on a VPS or Raspberry Pi with SSH access. That’s no longer the case. Shell access to the container running this requires going through the host, either via the web management interface within the local network or SSH via a particular machine.

The effect of this change is that my old continuous deployment pipeline that used rsync broke and I never bothered to fix it. I also switched the web mirror to use a static site generator instead of raw HTML since I wanted to eventually start a podcast (more on that later) and found that easier. The downside is this introduces a build step that makes any update a bit more painful. I used to be able to tap out a post on my phone, hit commit, and have it live in under a minute. Now, I basically need a good 15 minutes or so at a desktop to make any updates.

While some of these changes were for the sake of security (I did not want to leave port 22 open to the great big world), the changes to the web version of juliette.zone were so I could create a podcast. Astute observers will notice that there is no Juliette zone podcast. So why didn’t this happen? I think the simple answer is that what I really wanted more than to make a podcast, an audio product to be consumed by others, is to have conversations with my friends and interesting people I know. I’ve tried to do this more over the past year and scheduling a coffee alone is difficult enough. If I can just write about a discussion that interests me, why overcomplicate things?

Music is a bit of an odd case. I honestly don’t know the best way to share it and rarely feel as if I finish pieces in a way that is completely satisfying. Once my schedule is a bit more open, I may want to discuss a “weekly melody” or something to just get into the habit of making something and sharing it regardless of how bad it is. It doesn’t really fit well within the Gemini model, unfortunately, so again there will need to be some manual effort between the web and gemspace.

I’m open to suggestions if there is anything people would like to see. My email address and social media are

My main action item remains setting up a deployment process that gives me the ease of typing a text post on my phone and having it live in a reasonable amount of time. It doesn’t need to be as rapid as the old rsync process was, but I’d like it to keep effort to a minimum. Unfortunately, between the drafting of this post and uploading it, my main computer died. It may be a while until this is the priority.

Addendum: Almost immediately after writing this I became so fed up with not having an easier way to post that I wrote a Python script to turn the same text files into a gemini capsule and web site, made a GitHub action to run the script on each commit, and made a second Python script to update my server. It’s far from perfect but if you’re reading this at least it works.