A new start...

Falling in Love with Writing again...?

So I wanted to try to get back to blogging again. I've been feeling the urge for some sort of creative outlet and been thinking on how to get it out.

Most days I barely have the mental energy to even post anything to social media, never mind sit and write paragraphs for a blog post.

Yet, the urge to do something remains strong...

So I decided to resurrect this blog. I've wiped (albeit not entirely deliberately) the old site that was here, but as it only had a handful of posts before being abandoned back in February, it's not a huge loss.

I'm reluctant to even touch my main blog over at nerdrooted.com these days.

Wordpress is an unwieldy beast of a thing, and the management of the project have let themselves down a huge amount recently, what with the Wordpress CEO doxxing customers of a rival service that they weren't happy with. I mean, wth?

I've come to much prefer simpler more minimal approaches such as Publii with its static HTML files, deployed to a Netlify instance. Which sounds more complex than it actually is, but once it's setup it's pretty much just fire & forget.

I've also got my files for Publii now hosted on my cloud storage, so when I rebuild my PC at some point, I won't "accidentally" wipe the site again. Whoopsie.

While finishing this post I made the jump to Netlify from WordPress. I've also shifted the domain over so it's now pointing at the new nerdrooted blog on Publii! I've also cancelled my previous hosting, so until I ever hit a high enough bandwidth usage between Sartrek and Nerdrooted blogs, my hosting is now free, which is cool.

That blog goes back 10 years in February of 2025, and there's a lot of old content there that I'd hate to let go of completely, so I exported the entire blog and its contents, and re-imported them into Publii, which is an awesome feature to have available. 

Going forward...

So nerdrooted.com is now written via the Publii app. And unless it ever shuts down as a service, I guess I'll stick with it from now on, as flat HTML still tickles my pickle heading into 2025. It and Netlify are actually completely free, certainly for the volume of content and traffic I'll likely be getting.

Content-theme wise it'll be a mixture of random crap essentially, which will obviously include some WoW posts, but I think my days of posting exclusively about World of Warcraft might be done. It does mean I'll be running two blogs, but it's essentially the difference between choosing one site or another via a drop-down menu in Publii.

Speaking of WoW...

I still love playing the game. Dragonflight was an excellent expansion, and The War Within is very good so far too. I'm still playing at a Cutting Edge level, and we're currently working on Mythic Queen Ansurek, the final encounter in Nerub-ar Palace.

Right now though, I'm feeling a bit of ennui with the game, despite still enjoying it, which sounds weird.

Maybe because I'm largely finished with gearing, after a mammoth mythic+ marathon over a weekend a few weeks ago, where I got caught up on missing over 200 gilded crests, then proceeded to get capped again the following Weds by running another 8 dungeons, meaning over 5 days I'd earned over 300 gilded crests. Bear in mind each m+ dungeon over a key level of 8 only rewards 12 crests if you time it.

That's a LOT of mythic+ runs...

I'd gone from being our worst-geared raider, as I was off on holiday and had degree work to do, so hadn't been as focused on gearing for a couple of weeks, to one of our best. I'm currently just shy of 638 iLevel, which is getting pretty damned close to the maximum attainable (639).

So I may be feeling a touch of burnout with the game, which is kind of understandable, so I'll probably raid-log for the remainder of the tier. Or just do some more of the Anniversary event stuff, which has been ok. I've gotten all the T2 mogs already, so it's now just doing the likes of the Fel Cycle questline after finishing off the Detective achievement for that title.

Finishing off...

I'm hoping to keep up with this, again. I like getting my words out of my brain and down "on paper". It's cathartic. And maybe I should care less about metrics, page views, reader numbers, engagement statistics etc, and just write whatever crap pops into my head...

Not that I cared much about them to begin with, but it used to matter that someone was getting value out of this besides just me! Perhaps even that minimal level of investment in numbers should just be a thing of the past too. Even if it is just effectively me typing into the void. And given Publii has no method of commenting natively built in, what with it's static HTML output, that's probably for the best!