The 2025 Look Back
Another year has come and gone, as they say. In this time of reflection, I'd like to look back at 2025, and note what I did, what I liked, and what I'd like to improve on.
Silly website maintenance stuff
Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time on my website talking about making and maintaining the website. Trust me when I say that I make it look much more difficult to run a website compared to how it actually is. Even still, the website has shown a lot of positive growth this year! Not in the numbers sense, mind you. I don't track analytics. But in the past year, I've shipped Evie On-Line 2.0, which was the huge redesign I did a while back, I've added comments, and I've tried to streamline posting. This has somewhat worked out, and I've had spurts of more semi-active posting on here. Generally, I think that the biggest thing holding me back from shitposting on my own site is this faux air of prestige. I feel like I can't flood people's (RSS) feeds with my own garbage because it drowns out the quality posts and because it'll bother people. Outside of that, the site lacks real shares, and I'd like to better unify the design system and write more about the actual systems behind the site. This site has a bunch of interesting tech powering it! ...Not that it really warrants it.
Outside of that, There's the annoying conversation about hosting and morals. The code for Evie On-Line is currently hosted on Github, and the site itself, image hosting, and comments are all run through Cloudflare. Cloudflare is not great morals-wise, and I would like to self-host more of it and move away from Cloudflare whenever possible (not even mentioning that I've been paying for a cheap VPS for about 9 months now despite not even using it). I don't know if I'll ever truly be free, but there's a lot of improvements I can make right now without too much stress.
I also still have a massive todo list of minor improvements to make to the site that I've been (very) slowly working my way through. Thanks to Sage and Beeps for their feedback! I'm sorry I haven't made as much progress in that list as I would've liked. I started with the hardest task first...
To turn all this into a list of deliverables for 2026, it would be:
- Refine design system (smaller stuff like touch ups and bigger stuff like shares and improved comments)
- Refine site architecture
- Self-host site
- Move site codebase away from Github
- Add shares
- Add likes
- Improve comments (replies)
- Figure out a way of surfacing quality posts while still letting me shitpost relentlessly on main. I've seen some people separate "posting" from "articles" and I think that's for cowards.
- Continue to reupload cohost archive
- Do the list of feedback
Posting
That's right it's website stuff round 2. Last year I didn't post enough. This hasn't been due to an increase in touching grass. I've been on the socials more than ever and I should be on them less! The problem is that I haven't been writing enough. I haven't done enough shitposting OR effortposting. I have so many thoughts about dumb shit and I've let them all stay bottled up. This year I hope to change that. I plan to talk more about dumb manga I'm reading, whatever games I'm playing, any miscellaneous thoughts I'm having, etc. I think a big motivator for this for me is the fact that I have no record of what I have enjoyed this year that I could use for a year end list. There is no "Of the Year 2025" for me, and I want to have one for 2026.
Life
2025 was a year of big changes for me. I got my name legally changed, moved in with my girlfriend, got bottom surgery, and many other things. This year I'm hoping to mellow out a bit and try to build up some savings. I want 2026 to be the Year of Maintenance. Nothing new, just polishing up my life and trying to do what I can to make my life the best version of what it can be with the position I am in.
