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For the last week or so, I have been playing around with Jekyll and GitHub Pages as a possible replacement for my current WordPress site.

It was all very fun, and the simplicity of posting makes it a very attractive alternative.

Unfortunately, I have a lot of Indieweb features on my site (webmentions, micropubs, and postkinds etc.), and everything falls over when I try to implement Indieweb to a static website.

It is possible that I can get some kind of system working after another couple of weeks of tinkering. But I decided to stop instead.

The mood I got while researching Indieweb solutions/plugins for Jekyll is that most people have moved away from it. Either they have given up on Indieweb, or they have moved away from Jekyll.
Even if I were to get my site working now, there’s no guarantee that some future Jekyll update won’t break everything. So do I really want to spend unknown hours converting my existing WordPress site to Jekyll only to have it break a year from now? The answer, for now at least, is no.

If I got the wrong impression of the Jekyll/Indieweb landscape out there, by all means reach out and let me know. I’d love to know how you set up your site.

About a month ago I stumbled across this webring.

Webring, I hear you ask, is this 1996? No, this is a current, active webring. I find that infinitely charming and nostalgic.

It’s also how I discovered a thriving community of personal websites: neocities.org, which reminds me of high school, when we’d handcraft each individual page. Again, nostalgia.

This may have led to me researching Jekyll static sites — but that’s another story…

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I recently decided to jailbreak my Kindle, which was easier than I’d thought it would be, and been having fun fiddling with the expanded capabilities.

For example, I can now read all my online manga directly from the eink device.
On the flipside, a lot of online manga are in full-colour now so those don’t really work that well on the Kindle. But for standard black and white manga, it’s amazing.

I also love the ebook reading options/settings available in KOReader.
I could customise actions to gestures and taps on the Kindle. For example, I can long press the bottom right corner of the screen to refresh the page (a great feature for manga readers), and a quick tap on the bottom left would toggle the frontlight on or off.
What it’s missing is some method to sync my reading progress between KOReader with some iOS app, for those occasions when I don’t have my Kindle on me.

And let’s not forget that with KOReader, I can set my Kindle’s sleep screen wallpaper to whatever I want now. I can even point it to a folder and have it rotate through a selection of wallpapers upon sleep.

As for how I transfer books to KOReader: all my ebooks are currently on Calibre running off my Synology NAS, so I can access my Calibre library either through Calibre’s Content Server, wireless device connection, or OPDS. This means I can:
1. push specific books from Calibre to my Kindle
2. connect my Kindle to Calibre and download books that way, or
3. tag books with a specific tag so they’d auto-download to my Kindle whenever it connects

As most of you have heard, Amazon has removed the ability for you to download the ebooks you’ve purchased, forcing you to read either through their Kindle app or Kindle device. Even though I’d predominantly read through the Kindle app, this move did not sit well with me. Which is what led me down this rabbit hole of jailbreaking and backing up all my Kindle ebooks.

If any of the above sounds enticing to you, I highly suggest giving jailbreaking a go.