Now
What I've been up to lately and what's on my mind. Updated monthly-ish.
PostedI decided to start a Now page. It’s a whole thing, quite trendy. I’m a conformist.
I think I’ll try to make this a monthly thing, mostly as a reason/excuse to write more. I haven’t had much self-hosting or Linux things that I’ve been playing around with, my server and self-hosting set up are stable and reliable, on auto-pilot and only interacted with (like, administratively, not in general — I use at least some of my self-hosted services every day) since I have unattended-upgrades for the server and Watchtower to auto-update my containers.
So for February (I’m writing this in March, but I decided to start a month back, because reasons) I’ll just write about how I set this Now page up.
I had noticed a lot of people updated their Now page without having a record or history of prior, uh, “Nows.” Some solved this by making it a blog post with the “now” tag/category, and going to /now on their site would just redirect to the latest post with that tag. I considered doing the same at first, but my blog posts use a unique layout with a bunch of extra blog-specific stuff that makes no sense for anything that’s not a blog post.
Instead I made “now” it’s own Astro content collection, and each “now” is a markdown file at src/content/now/*, but I built the page at src/pages/now/index.astro (which after build routes to /now) so that it shows the latest markdown file.
Prior “nows” (I’m typing this word too much and it is losing all meaning) are linked at the bottom, where they can be reached at /now/[slug]. The filenames of the markdown files, which are the slugs, I just name after the year/month, e.g. 2026-02.md because there will be no more than one a month. Older “entries” of the /now page can be reached at /now/2026-02, /now/2026-03, etc. If you go to the slug for the latest one, it redirects to /now.
And that’s how that works. Let’s see if I actually keep updating it every month.