Aronia's year in review

6 min read (1047 words)

#dev #web

Reviewing a few things that happened, compared to last year, if you happen to remember 2024's review.

Politically

It still quite sucks ass! The law from 2024 still wasn't considered important enough to go through the assembly this year with the ongoing mess. Still to be watched over. Solidarity income hasn't been revaluated since 2023 and it really sucks. Unemployed people get harassed constantly, under threat to lose their unemployment income.

But we will win in the end. From last year:

My resolution is to keep fighting to the best of my ability, and I hope you do too.

I did keep fighting, the entire year. I will keep doing so next year. My resolution for 2026 is to hope for the future, because it's all there is for us.

I encourage everyone to get involved, even if it's in a small way or just once. Whatever space your world has for solidarity, you have to fill every bit of it. Staying isolated will make you turn inward, and we cannot let that happen to you or your peers.

This blog

First of all: no more Olive, it's Aronia now. :p

style

I switched my static site generator from Hugo to Zola. In the process I remade all the HTML and CSS, removing the JS bits which were either useless or could be replaced with CSS. The way Zola works feels clearer to me, and my blog no longer flashes a button for no reason. It's alright.

Lyra Rebane's article You no longer need JavaScript really helped motivate me to do this. It showcases a lot of things possible in CSS without any JavaScript, and I recommend reading it especially if you're also allergic to JS.

Last year, I'd also mentioned wanting to use freezeframe.js to prevent autoplaying animated images. It's still bothering me that it's JS. Because of that, the GIF still plays until the script finishes loading. I found a potential alternative in this css-tricks article: to provide the animated image in a details element, with a static image underneath, somewhat like this.

<style>
object-and-details {
  display: inline-block;
  position: relative;
}

object-and-details img {
  display: inline-block;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0px;
  left: 0px;
  overflow: visible;
}
</style>
<object-and-details>
  <img src="image.jpg" />
  <details>
    <img src="image.gif" loading="lazy" />
  </details>
</object-and-details>

I haven't looked into this yet.

substance

This year, I have published all of 2 posts, including this one. I also have started 7 drafts this year, along with 2 others I've been carrying since 2023... I was really busy doing other things.

My one published post this year took less than 24 hours from initial idea to going public. It's a good one though it has some typos and also implies fish is POSIX-compliant, which it definitely isn't. Some of my drafts need a bit more time than that, but there are some others I think I can spare the time to post sometime in the next, um, 6 months? I'll let everyone know.

conclusion

From last year's review:

My resolutions for this blog are:

  • Change the design to something appealing to me. Remove any JavaScript.
  • Be more verbose when writing. I do not have to fit everything in the damn world in a single sentence.
  • I did change the design, it does appeal to me better. I did remove any and all JavaScript. This was a triumph :p
  • My one blog post doesn't have any paragraphs longer than 5 lines, but for the given subject, I find it good enough. This resolution will need to carry on.

Therefore, my resolutions for this blog in 2026 are:

  • Be more verbose when writing. I do not have to fit everything in the damn world in a single sentence.
  • Complete some of my lower-effort drafts
  • Adapt the HTML-CSS snippet from above to stop autoplaying animated images to this blog

Media

I played Psychroma back in july. It was enerving and I wanted to explore it more, on this blog. I'll just say this: it was very meaningful to me for this game to be localized.

I've also read a few books by Ursula K. Le Guin: Planet of Exile, Rocannon's World and The Dispossessed. Very meaningful and I especially recommend The Dispossessed, especially if you're interested in anarchism.

Last year I had set up Miniflux (a RSS reader) and Shiori (a bookmarks manager) on my home server. I use Miniflux daily and it's satisfying though I struggle to keep up with the amount of entries I get. Shiori is more of a struggle but it's still useful.

From last year:

My content resolution is to stop keeping so many tabs open and save them in Shiori instead.

I did not reduce my amount of tabs this year, so I'm keeping this resolution.

Personal productions

I made a few things this year!!

  • I streamed with cqql the programming of a glitch art project, where we emulated the DVI specification and inserted data errors in the bitstream. cqql wrote an article about the whole thing; I had started to write my own but never posted it. Hopefully in 2026!
  • I played a bit of pokemon and for fun, I handsew the world's tiniest journal (1 inch wide, like 20 pages in it) to track which pokemons I still have to evolve and how. And then I gave up on playing, but it was still fun to make :p. I swear I'll scan it tomorrow.

Conclusion

Out of the four resolutions I had for 2025, I kept up with two of them and that's pretty good.

For 2026, I have quite a few:

  • to hope for the future, because it's all there is for us.
  • to be more verbose when writing for this blog. I do not have to fit everything in the damn world in a single sentence.
  • to complete some of my lower-effort drafts.
  • to adapt the HTML-CSS snippet to stop autoplaying animated images to this blog.
  • to stop keeping so many tabs open and bookmark them instead.

This is more specific than last year so even though it's one more thing, it seems tankable. To be fair, most of those are pretty low priority and therefore pretty chill. Have a good year.