A year of melabit.com

2025 was a turning point for this little blog. Leaving the comfort zone of Wordpress.com was neither easy nor painless, especially when I discovered that once the site was online, Jekyll was slow, too slow to be usable.

Thankfully, Hugo saved the day, although there are still many details to be ironed out, first and foremost the website’s graphic design.

– Image generated by Google Gemini.

Managing posts in two different languages is not easy, but it is worth it, as posts in English allow to reach a pool of users that would be unimaginable if I only wrote in Italian.

The main concern with the new site is the near absence of comments on posts. I don’t know if it’s because they’re too complicated, too long, or both. The fact is that the lack of comments is really worrying. And this is despite the fact that there are a good number of visitors and that on average 5% of them spend 15 minutes or more on the site. Maybe in the end they’re too exhausted to comment, who knows!

Needless to say, I never use AI tools to write the posts. At most, I use them to look up a few technical terms when I can’t remember the Italian equivalent (for instance, I always forget that Tab in Italian is Scheda, not Linguetta). Sometimes I try to use AI to improve the flow of a few sentences, but it’s almost always a waste of time. In the end, the text sounds so flat that it’s better not to write it at all.

However, I admit that I use AI for the initial translations. I need it mainly to save typing time, even though it then takes quite a while to refine the result and make the translation more fluid and natural.

I also often use AI to generate the images at the top of the posts. In this case, I have no choice. While I’m not bad at writing, I’ve always been second to last in the class when it comes to drawing and graphics, and only because the last one was really terrible. So I’m doing you a favor. But even with Google’s much-celebrated Nano Banana, it took a lot of effort to convince it to generate the image for this post, with the right text, the real homepage, and so on. Anyone who says that Nano Banana is so smart that it understands what you want right away is telling you lies.

If all goes well, 2026 will bring some new developments. I’m not sure in what order, but revising the graphic theme is definitely at the top of the list.

Stay tuned! In the meantime, best wishes for 2026. May it be a year full of good things and happiness for everyone!