Newsletter #11

1 November 2025

Hey everyone! I’m back for my second-to-last newsletter post of the year.

What’s new on the blog?

This month I posted 4 blog posts about hiking:

  1. A guide to staying at Japanese mountain huts: I’ve done a number of hut stays over the past couple of years, so I wanted to put a bit of a summary about what it’s like to stay in a hut in Japan.
  2. A hike to Mt Nishi-Azuma: A super pretty autumn hike up in Fukushima
Mt Nishi-Azuma
  1. A hike to Mt Azuma-Kofuji and Mt Issaikyo: I actually did this one back in 2023, but it’s located quite nearby to Mt Nishi-Azuma so it reminded me to write a post about it.
  2. Hiking Mt Kita and Mt Aino: being Japan’s second-tallest mountain, Mt Kita really is one of “the” mountains of Japan so I’m glad I finally got to climb it.
Mt Kita

I also did two more hikes in October, which I’ll be writing my posts for over the coming weeks!

A little blog design update

I’ve been playing around with trying to make my hiking homepage a little more informative. I see my hiking page as having two main use-cases:

  1. For a new person visiting my site, to quickly get a summary of hiking in Japan.
  2. Making sure that return readers can quickly see my latest posts.

So what I’ve settled on is adding a little carousel component near the top of the page which has a bunch of information in it - but otherwise you can just scroll past it to get to my hikes.

I’d been wanting to do this for a while now but kept on procrastinating on it / couldn’t quite land on a design, so I’m glad I managed to figure something out.

Working on Hardcover

Outside of my blog, I’ve also been building out Hardcover’s new homepage. Right now we’ve released a preview version to our paid users, which has been a super useful way of getting some feedback before we do a full rollout to everybody.

A sneak peek of how it’s looking so far

October in numbers

  • 🏋️‍♀️ 3 visits to the gym
  • 🏃‍♀️ Ran 34km and hiked 41km
  • 🇯🇵 Wanikani Level 44 (no progression)
  • 🇨🇳 Pimsleur Mandarin Lesson 74 (no progression)
  • 🇨🇳 HanziHero Level 2 (no progression)
  • 📚 Read 3 books
  • 📝 Published 4 blog posts
  • 💻 20 hours on Hardcover

In part due to all of the hiking I was doing, this is the least amount of time I’ve spent working on Hardcover so far - but it still averages out at 5 hours per week, which is the expected amount. Still no progression on the language-learning front 😅

I also managed to hurt my back a bit again (ahhh) and caught a cold to round out October.

See you all next month!

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