Website Changes (July 2025)

Yesterday, I completed and published a long-contemplated overhaul of this website. The changes affect appearance, content organization, mailing lists, RSS feeds, and blog comments. I’ll explain these things below, and I’ll also talk about what motivated the changes and what website services I’m now using.

Content Organization

I’m still writing primarily about two topics:

• French horn, now at steveeddins.com/blog/horn
• MATLAB and image processing, now at steveeddins.com/blog/matlab

Also, I anticipate occasionally posting about other topics at steveeddins.com/blog/general. This post, for example, appears there.

If you visit the top-level blog page, steveeddins.com/blog, you’ll see the recent posts from all three sections—horn, matlab, and general.

I have created redirects so that old links to existing blog posts in their previous locations should still work.

Mailing List

Until yesterday, I was publishing the website using the Ghost Pro service, which provides email notification service. Now that I have moved away from Ghost Pro, I have reverted back to using MailerLite. At regular intervals, probably once per day, I will have MailerLite check for new posts and send notifications if needed.

If you are an email subscriber, then your notifications will depend on your topic preferences, which I have migrated over to MailerLite. If you want to change your topic preferences, just click on the link at the end of a notification email.

Subscribers may see a one-time repeat notification for some previously published content.

To subscribe to email notifications, enter your email address at steveeddins.com/mailing-list.

RSS Feeds

Some of you may be using an RSS feed reader app to follow new posts. The new feed options are at steveeddins.com/rss-feeds. The old RSS feed URLs are being redirected to the new ones. Feed subscribers may see a one-time repeat notification for some previously published content.

Comments

Since I started my personal blog about horn (2023) and about MATLAB and image processing (2024), I have tried a few different methods for supporting reader comments. I switched to Ghost Pro for website publishing last year, and I enabled its built-in commenting system. However, none of the commenting systems I tried were satisfactory. Hugo, the website publishing system I am now using, does not have built-in support for commenting, although third-party commenting plugins are available.

For now, I have decided not to support reader comments on blog posts. I do not expect there to be big impact on readers, because very few comments have ever been submitted. There was one recent post, “Function Syntax Design Conundrum,” that drew several interesting comments, though, and I wanted to save those. I have updated the content of that post to include the submitted comments.

If you have thoughts about any post, I’d love to hear them, and you can reach out to me using one of the methods linked at the bottom of the page.

Web Publishing Transitions

Beware of excessively nerdy jargon here. Feel free to skip over it.

I started using Hugo, a static site generator, for web publishing back in 2023. The concept of writing content using simple Markdown files and a GitHub repository appealed to me, and I generally liked the way that the system worked. I used Netlify to automatically deploy website updates whenever the GitHub repository changed. I used MailerLite for email notifications. I experimented with different Hugo plugins for supporting comments, but there was nothing that I liked. I wrote a tool that converted a MATLAB script directly into a blog post, and this tool was far easier to create and work with than similar tools created for publishing MATLAB scripts to WordPress.

Last year, I began to think that I was spending too much time on the nuts and bolts of Hugo, and not enough time writing blog posts. So, I sought to streamline the process. After some investigation, I moved the site and mailing list over to Ghost, using a paid “Pro” subscription. At that time, I also decided to combine my two previous websites, hornjourney.com and matrixvalues.com, into one, steveeddins.com.

Sadly, Ghost failed to live up to my hopes:

• Ghost themes turned out to be much less interchangeable than I expected, and I had a hard time finding one that I liked. I wanted to customize them, but I quickly discovered that it would be much harder and more time-consuming than with Hugo.
• The built-in mailing list management process was awkward and could not be automated in the way that I expected.
• The built-in commenting system was lame, especially for people who wanted to include some MATLAB code in their comments.
• The level of Markdown support was disappointing. It turned out to be supported only as an editor entry format, useful only for composing certain sections of a post. The Ghost API doesn’t support Markdown as an input format, which makes it far more difficult than I expected to create a MATLAB script publishing tool.

It was Ghost’s site backup procedure that finally pushed me over the edge. Ghost Pro documentation, especially the high-level feature descriptions, present site backup as an easy, self-service thing. However, the backup includes only blog post text content. It does not include any images or other media files! To get a truly complete site backup, you have to contact Ghost Pro support and explain to them why you need it before they will provide it. That is just bananas.

Anyway, based on my real experience with both systems, Hugo and Ghost, I decided that I really liked Hugo and that I wanted to go back to it, with a new site design with a new organization of the different blog topics. I’m using MailerLite once again. I’m using Vercel for deployment now instead of Netlify.