The branding & theme was named by my partner, Annie 🙂

I actually started this specific post as an addendum to my previous post; but realised that there’s enough in here that I want to talk about on both a personal and technical level that it should warrant its own entry.

Why “Minty Charmander”?

Well, Annie thought the colour scheme reminded her of a Charmander, and combined with the light green highlights – “Mint” 🙂

The colour scheme uses a number of my favourite colours in a limited palette – purposefully, as I recall from some old design course literally a couple decades ago now, that in UX a small number of colours that can be interchanged and not conflict with each other, was better than a large dynamic swatch of colour for getting information across.

I am using the ol’ trusty Bootstrap framework for the UI and layout of everything. I don’t have any real special rationale for using Bootstrap – it’s just what I’m most familiar with; I think as I ease myself back into coding from a long break, it’s nice to just crawl before I can walk, before I can run 😅

Planetscale?!

Laziness and the idea that I needed a stable service to run a DB for my little projects convinced me to continue with Planetscale – yes, it costs $47 USD a month, but it’s more stable, and more nicely managed than I could ever do with a random self hosted solution.

I decided to continue paying it for the time being, pending further efforts to make things self hosted down the track, but for the time being – it’s nice to have a DB that is:

• highly available;
• able to spawn itself into a main, and dev branch

I could probably implement this without a paid system – but I feel like the DB service works as a backend for multiple systems (as it would if I were to self-host) – and that’s a single point of failure that I couldn’t upkeep like a service that is designed to stay online professionally.

End of the day, it’s actually pretty easy to justify the cost of this database for myself; and I’ve spent more on dumber stuff in the past. At least this is a sensible subscription 😜

So, what’s next?

Well, the branding is mostly done, but there’s a few missing things like Search results statistics, and category browsing callouts, to name a couple of things. I’ll be taking my time fixing everything, and eventually hope to start using this blog a lot more to diary more things that I get up to on a more personal level, as opposed to just dumping whatever pseudo-technical stuff comes across my mind!

We have a new look for the blog! I hope you all like it 🙂

For those that are curious, below is how things used to look (not too long ago!)…

I’ve been using a theme called Independent Publisher now for about 7 years or so. And while I am indeed retired; I didn’t want to let my technical skills (as little as they are) go to waste nowadays. So I updated the look to both jtiong.dev, and jtiong.com to match similarly in branding now 🙂

It’s been more than a moment since I last touched a WordPress Theme, and so I’ve no doubt that there’s bugs and issues with the new theme you see now (built from scratch lovingly over a day or so, as you’ll be able to see from the Commits on jtiong.dev!). But this change will give me plenty of things to do to fix and maintain for the future with this blog.

And now finally after most of a day’s work, my domains are starting to be a little bit more on-brand! ♥

I previously posted about jtiong.dev – keeping my commit logs going and making things presentable for future collaborators and colleagues, as well as my own little bit of self promotion on the internet.

With my recent break in work and taking the time to both sharpen and upskill myself – I thought I’d bring this into the new future with the site pulling from my Github account instead of a now defunct GitLab installation.

In the current “1.0” version:

• Commits are automatically fed through via CURL request
• There’s no censorship for any potentially sensitive information
• There’s no authentication for management of commits/repos
• There’s no filtering you can do
• The date/commit times are inconsistent

Not to mention it’s GitLab powered and as I’m currently working through some property changes – I’m bouncing between two properties and the server hardware hosting GitLab is currently turned off.

Queue, my move to using Planetscale as my core DB service for my personal online stuff, and moving my code to Github where possible (because it’s where everyone else is).

For version 1.1 which upgrades this, I’d like to add:

• A system with Auth that lets me hide a repo, or a given commit hash for any potentially sensitive info from being revealed
• A filtering system by repo so you can see, per repo, the commits to that repository
• More accurate representation of the commits/date/timeline

Implementation Logic

Just a couple of loops to go through Repos → Commits is all I really need for my personal scale. Below is a very simplified diagram:

This’ll all be included into some cron tasks that run maybe hourly or so to avoid spamming GitHub.

It’s just simple little pleasurable busywork to be honest, but after about 6 months of not really touching any code and taking my time with stuff, it’s nice to get back into the groove!

Annie and I checked out VIVID 2024 for Sydney — here’s a link to the album of photos

https://photos.jtiong.com/share/OBiBXUG7SIFhx1IwlhRxBRaThtL0yZalU3ZC42wPP2W6GZ3Kao6DFOqikcR-VgC6Bxs

This post was from after the move to the new house, and at the start of 2024 – at this point I had not recovered the 2023 posts to the blog from the old server that was no longer plugged in. This has since been restored, but I’ve included the post here for full context anyway!

JT

So, I’ve been pretty crazy busy, even with the idea of “Retirement” being bandied about in my life.

I’ve added a couple more 2023 posts, and hope to increase/improve the amount of content I can restore, but it’s not looking all that promising to be honest…! To restore it all, I’ll have to pull out one of the old Dell R330 servers and spin ‘er up so I can extract all the info as needed, etc.

Easier said than done considering it’s in a storage crate under the house right now 🙁

It’s definitely sitting in the back of my mind though, as it’s a year of tech upgrades and updates where I had finally configured a lot of my server stuff to a level that I was really happy with…!

For now though, I just wanted to post here and make sure the site’s staying alive…!

Some technical challenges!

My site currently uses the hobby plan of Planetscale – my preferred sort of “cloud” hosted MySQL DB instance; unfortunately this is going away and they’re forcing everyone onto a minimum $47 USD/month plan. I can understand the need for sustainability though, and it’ll reduce the amount of “exploiters” that have taken advantage of such a free plan.

Sadly, it’s an expense I am not really willing to pay either, not for my small hobbyist needs. So it’s time to migrate back to the ol’ self hosted MySQL instance on my own VPS somewhere.

This post was from after the move to the new house, and at the start of 2024 – at this point I had not recovered the 2023 posts to the blog from the old server that was no longer plugged in. This has since been restored, but I’ve included the post here for full context anyway!

JT

We start the year with some technical issues!

I’ve had some migration problems with moving my sites and servers around from my old house to my new house, and as such, I’ve lost most of the 2023 entries! 😢

The highlight of the year was my Japan 2023 trip in May with everyone, so I’ll try and put up at least the photos to keep things going 🙂

For now at least, the site is once again working, and online!

Still a whole lot of stuff to move and organise; and admittedly I’ve been busy trying to figure out the next steps while I enjoy a career break.

There’s so much to do and setup. Moving house has been a pretty pricey exercise, but I took the opportunity to build nicer furniture than my old cobbled together setup that I had back at my old house.

Now I’m just mass purchasing IKEA’s Lagkapten (heh) tabletops and Alex drawer sets!

It’s not quite the final setup, but I have set up one room as my office now for full time Day Trading and some development/upskilling…

Yes, you’re seeing that right – 6 monitors, and they’re all arranged from left to right like the madman that I am. That’s across 2 PCs however haha! 🤣

My bedroom is a mess because I’ve moved my main PC out of there so that I can build this office, while I’ll resort to using my Macbook Air in the bedroom for smaller moments, like personal admin stuff or updating some journaling (like this blog, Obsidian, and my bullet journal!)

I’ll spare you the pics of the bedroom at least 😏

Anyway, as our first inspection fast approaches, I’m finally getting things tidy enough that I think there’ll be no issues. And that’s really the August update for now!

Very recently my time at MindArc sadly came to an end; so I’ve been working to skill up with some of the things I’ve gleaned from my time there. Even though it was a short time, it was a great learning experience coming into an eCommerce agency.

I’m looking at using the following tech stack to resurrect my currently dead jtiong.com site!

• Cloudflare Workers
• Cloudflare Pages
• PlanetScale DB
• Remix.js
• Tailwind CSS

I’m adding on to the PHP skillset (although not abandoning it!) – with a few of my other tools I build still using PHP (such as this repo for one of my Rust game servers)

After my time at Padua learning Angular (which I found really confusing); and struggling for a bit – I think I’m ready to dive into using typescript with Remix to do a lot of stuff. This’ll be interesting…!

On June 3rd…

2023 seems to be the year of “Moving (On)”

Just got back from 10 days in Tokyo — outstanding stuff with the cuisine and the sights seen; it’ll be like my 5th time in Tokyo – but I’m not overly fussed ,there’s been a lot of changes in the time since I was last there (about 2014).

I’m now in the process of moving over to a new house this weekend, and it’s been extremely cathartic as well as high pressure juggling this while trying to work without being impeded by it.

The new house is about 60 years newer than the other one; so it’s nice to try and fit everything into a nicer “style”. I’m also able to sit down, and gauge exactly what it is I want to take with me. Being a forced “purge” is nice….

Owning the old house means I don’t need to rush the process either, but it’s tempting not to just jump in and buy everything new too >.<

22nd of June…

It’s an opportunity to change things, and grow up a little more.

I funnily, have half a dozen drafts sitting here in the backend, talking about moving and rearranging my stuff within my old house. And I didn’t have a way to articulate them all into a single consolidated post.

Life has a funny way of things – now I’m forced to make that more drastic leap.

This post has been sitting here since June 3rd – I started it the day of moving to the new house. And for the last few weeks – I have slowly been tweaking and adapting my new place to my needs.

Some worries do sit in the back of my mind, but most of all my current room is super clean, and organised 😄 definitely a win!

It’s helped me find some sort of “center” for the time being, and I have a mild gripping terror of going back to my old house to focus on what to throw out, and what to keep 😂

It’s nice though, I moved my main gaming desktop to my new place, and have only the minimum of stationery and possessions.

I have a nice new bed frame, and table that match – and my bed has been changed from a King Single to a Queen sized bed. I used to be a lot more utilitarian in what I had, but comfort and aesthetics are more key nowadays. I’m getting old haha…

Also, I hate IKEA furniture assembly. Wow what a torturous ordeal it’s been building the bed frame, and the work tables I use…

The OnlySnacks fam hit up Japan 🙂 It was a helluva adventure as a big group

The photo album for the adventure is here