This Is a Blog
2022-01-21
My website has been languishing for a few years, and I think there are a few reasons for this.
The first is that my site has not been optimized for content creation. Call me a Luddite, but I created this website with a simple tech stack in mind. What this meant to me seven to eight years ago was that I would write the entire website in HTML by hand. It turns out that this is not a great way to maintain an up-to-date website. Maybe once a year or two I would muster up the willpower to relearn enough HTML to add a page or two.
The second is that I did not have a goal in mind for this website. It was supposed to be a place for me to dump thoughts, but to what end? Without a strong reason to add information to this website, I simply ignored it most of the time.
Well, both of those things have changed. I still believe in a highly simple tech stack for this website. In modern front-end development, it feels like there's a new fancy framework or language to learn every month. I am sure that there are legitimate use cases for such tools, but this website is not one of them. With simplicity and ease of content creation in mind, as well as around eight years of professional code monkey experience under my belt, I sat down and rewrote the way I maintain this website. I write the pages in Markdown, and a simple script converts each Markdown file to HTML and concatenates it with a header and footer. Easy to understand, and easy for me to add content to.
On a more personal and less technological level, I've had a lot of time over the past two years of the pandemic to do some introspection. I feel pretty lonely in this world, and I came to the conclusion that it's important for me to put more of my own thoughts and creations out there, partly as a therapeutic exercise for myself, and partly so that people out there similar to me may feel a little less alone on the off chance that they stumble upon my stuff. I have also made a very active effort over the past year or so to wean myself off of deluge of attention-seeking applications that dominate all our lives, and reclaim my time for my own. Combining all of this, I found the motivation to rewrite this website, and actually add something substantial to it for the first time in recent memory.
Of course, I do fear that this turns into one of those sad blogs with a big "hello world!" post and very little after that. If you are reading this and there are hardly any other posts, tell me to get off my ass and I will genuinely appreciate it.
See you around!