New Blog Website

TL/DR: Blog moving to https://strakul.com/blog

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For the past 14 years, I've been maintaining this blog, Strakul's Thoughts, hosted at blogger.com. As of today, I'm porting the content to a new instance. As I've become more familiar with development tools, I wanted to move away from the limited (but easy-to-use) offerings at Blogger and host my own custom site.

This blog is now running Jekyll with the Chirpy theme. I became familiar with Jekyll about half a year ago since it's being used for blog management at work. The appeal to me was content as markdown files which makes writing and editing posts easier and not needing to worry about HTML or all the other features—that's all handled by the Jekyll build.

There are tons of Jekyll themes out there. I was originally leaning towards Adam Blog 2.0, but opted finally for Chirpy. The Chirpy theme is simpler for text-heavy blogs like this one. I may continue to style it, such as changing some of the colors and such, but I'm happy with how it looks.

While Jekyll serves as the interface, I still needed to host it which is where I turned to GitHub Pages. This is now a version-controlled repo that builds and deploys the site. Furthermore, I integrated giscus to allow for comments. This does require a GitHub account to add comments, but it's an open-source, free solution for website interactions.

The largest change you may notice, however, is in the URL. I purchased the strakul.com domain and this blog is now accessible through https://strakul.com/blog. If you go to the top level strakul.com, you'll see my professional homepage, which has links to some of my socials including the blog. If you accidentally go to blog.strakul.com, you should be redirected to the new URL.

Moving forward, all posts will go to strakul.com/blog and will not be in this blogger site. This site will remain alive for preserving links, but all posts have been migrated over.

I'm excited for this change as it should give me more control and flexibility in how I manage this website should there be a need for changes in the future.

Book Review: Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Strife is the 4th book in the Children of Time series. It continues the trend of terraforming planets, alien creatures, and forays into the nature of consciousness. Here is the Goodreads blurb:

From the award-winning master of sci-fi Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife is the unmissable follow-up space opera to the highly acclaimed Children of Time, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.

In this epic adventure, we visit a far-future after earth fell, where ark ships had hunted for a new home. They sought lost worlds terraformed in earth’s forgotten past. We follow a ship crewed by maverick humans, spiders and a spectacularly punchy mantis shrimp captain as they rediscover one such world, and an ark.

Then human crewmate Alis wakes to discover that she, her captain and the ship’s intelligence are the only ones left on their ship. But what happened to those who left to explore the ark… and the world below?

Children of Strife is the extraordinary next volume set in the Children of Time universe, featuring epic adventure, first contact and the nature of intelligence among the stars.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.