A month of finding your way around

The September update was about the new look. This month the work went into the structure underneath it: how posts are grouped, how you get from one to the next, and how a post page uses the screen. And, at last, into writing posts: twelve went online in October, and fifteen since the last week of September. Two series got going: Proxmox from scratch started, and My home servers picked up again after a long pause.

The front page and the categories

The front page is now grouped by subject. Each top-level category has its own banner with the latest posts under it, and the newest posts across the site come first.

Every category page opens with the same banner, and when you scroll down, a thin version of it stays at the top, so you can still see which category you are in.

The categories themselves have been tidied up. The larger subjects are gathered under a few headings: Homelab, Computing, IT Professional and Home Automation. Several categories have got a proper landing page with an introduction: Homelab, Proxmox tutorials, Nextcloud, Networking, Microsoft 365 Admin, Books and Electronics.

There is a breadcrumb at the top of every category page and every post, for example Categories / Homelab / Servers, so you can always step back up.

Series

Many of the posts I am writing now belong to a series, and the site shows that:

  • At the top of a post in a series there is a box listing the parts, with the one you are reading highlighted.
  • At the bottom there are links to the previous and the next part.
  • On the post cards, a small badge tells you which series and which part a post is.

The first series are under way. Proxmox from scratch started on 7 October with installing the server and continued with a first virtual machine, and My home servers has picked up again with a new Proxmox server and the plan for a hyperconverged one. Jellyfin at home starts on 6 November.

Reading a post

  • Wider header, same readable text. The title and the cover image of a post now use the full width, like the front page and the category pages do. The text itself stays in a column that is comfortable to read.
  • Lists, links, code, tables and quotes inside posts have been restyled, so they are easier to tell apart from the running text.
  • Cover images on more of the older posts, such as the EdgeRouter X post, Reconnecting FatAgnus and What is RAID?. A few posts now have my own photos as covers, like the first part of Proxmox from scratch.
  • Photos and screenshots inside posts are now sized for your screen, so they load faster, especially on a phone. A picture on a line of its own can have a caption, and clicking it opens it at full size.
  • Notes on older posts. When a newer post has overtaken an older one, the older one gets a short note at the top pointing to the newer post. Setup 2024 was the first.
  • Explainers get a red “Explainer” stamp on their cover, starting with What is RAID?

Old posts are archived, not deleted

Some of the older posts and pages describe things that no longer exist: the old J-Cave itself, the Amigas I have sold, and my servers as they were in 2024. Deleting them would break links to them and throw away what search engines know about them, so they are archived instead.

An archived post keeps its address and says at the top that it is kept for reference and may be out of date, with a link to what replaced it. It no longer shows on the front page, among the related articles or in the RSS feed, and on its category page it sits in an “Archived” section at the bottom. All of them are listed on the new archive page.

Videos only load when you press play

Posts with a YouTube video now show a picture of the video with a play button. The video itself is only fetched from YouTube when you click. Until then, nothing is sent to YouTube or Google, so you are not tracked by them just because you opened a post with a video in it.

The site is now called J-Cave.dk everywhere, including in the browser tab and in search results, and it has a logo. The header shrinks when you scroll, to leave more room for what you are reading. Posts without their own cover image get a new default one.

Posts since September

A new post now comes out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. October didn’t quite stick to that. In the first full week I squeezed two news posts in on top of the three regular ones, one of them on a Thursday, Office 2021 support ends on 13 October. That wasn’t the plan, and it won’t happen again: five posts in one week left no room when the homelab needed attention, and a regular post had to move a week. Until the series posts are written well ahead, it stays at three a week. And part 2 of Proxmox from scratch, the virtual machine, came out a day late, on Thursday 22 October, built on my own installation with my own screenshots.

What’s still to come

On the site

  • Finding things: a search box for the whole site, an RSS feed with only the posts in it, and the coming posts listed on each category page.
  • Comments are still on the list.
  • Category banners: each category is getting its own picture for its banner, instead of the shared background, and so will the front page’s “Latest posts” and the archive page.
  • New categories: Home Assistant and ESPHome get their landing pages when their first posts come out, in February and March.
  • The privacy policy is due an update, and the categories that have nothing to do with IT, like gardening and building, are still on the list.

Posts and series

  • My home servers gets its last part on Friday: my hypervisors as they stand in 2026, and what happened to the backup server this month.
  • Proxmox from scratch carries on every Wednesday: containers this week, then storage, networking and backups in November.
  • Jellyfin at home starts on 6 November with Jellyfin in a Proxmox container, followed by how to organise a media library for it and hardware transcoding on an AMD processor.
  • Also in November: a USB drive that holds every installer I use, the monthly Patch Tuesday preview for Microsoft admins, and a book review, in Danish.