I need to fix my website

Yesterday's post is showing up on the homepage as being posted on August 05. Even though I posted it on August 04. I don't know why this is happening, but I have a pretty strong guess: I didn't post yesterday's entry until after 20h00 local time, and the third-party RSS-HTML widget I'm using converted the timestamp to UTC. I don't know why. I didn't ask it to. As far as I know, it never offered me the option. It just assumed the time zone in my feed time stamp didn't mean anything, I guess.

I don't like using the third party RSS-HTML widget, the only reason I do is because at the time, Kiki didn't have a way to automate a list of the most recent posts on the home page. To be honest, it was missing a bunch of features I kind of assumed it would have. It doesn't automate much, except generating the RSS feed (far, far too often, as has been discussed) and displaying a list of post with a given tag. Which never really worked properly, but I accidentally broke even more.

I changed some stuff about the way my page layout is generated to prevent the title of the post showing up twice in the RSS feed. It would show up twice: once in the title of the entry in feed, and once at the top of the blog post. I changed it so website-side, the title is generated outside of the scope of what gets slurped into the RSS entry, but in doing so, now when you look at a tag there's no background. It doesn't really matter though, because the tags feature has always been unusable. It doesn't show posts in reverse chronological order unless I link it with a specific command, so the tag list at the top of each blog post defaults to alphabetical order. Not that you would ever want to look at the blog that way, because when you click on for example the "blog" tag, it loads every blog post written so far, thousands and thousands of words. I just want it to display the date, title and link: basically just like how it worked on bearblog.

When kiki first launched, there was a huge burst of activity and updates right at the beginning, in April, fixing a lot of my early issues with it. I had made modifications to kiki, but it was fairly easy to upgrade to each new version, because the only changes I made were custom functions: variables wrapped in $$two dollar signs$$ that, when invoked, will execute some custom code. It was pretty easy to copy all of this over into the new version of kiki after an upgrade.

But then the updates stopped, and the developer, who I follow on Mastodon, stopped talking about it much. Three months passed, and I figured the developer had moved on to greener pastures. So I figured if I wanted anything else fixed, I would need to do it myself.

I've made a bunch of changes to the code all across kiki, not just the custom variables, to fix various little quibbles, also breaking some other stuff in the process. I'm just having a good time and learning as I go.

Anyway, the newest version of kiki was released 10 days ago, and it adds features that I really want, and I'm afraid to install it. I don't think it fixes any of the things I've fixed independently--if it does, the patch notes don't allude to it--so I would need to go back through the code and re-fix things. And there's always the inherent risk of new versions of software breaking things in unexpected ways.

As a rule, I hate software updates. They almost always break my workflow, make pointless changes, and don't tell me what, if anything, they actually fix. "Bug fixes and performance improvements"? Yeah, whatever. What bugs were fixed? In what ways is the performance improved? Tell me what's in it for me, and I'll decide if the update is something I want. Jerks.

Kiki isn't like that, the patches are all well-documented, and they're all useful updates. I'm just saying. The state of modern tech has got my hackles up about updating. This one will be good, though. I just need the brain to push through it. Which isn't gonna be after work any time soon. Brain is still fried.