I was inspired to start this website after finding some long-running, independent blogs and personal websites, some going back as far as the 90s. Each person's site had its own balance of specialist and personal writing. Some discussed only themed topics like software engineering, web design, maths or book reviews, while others were used to record the owner's day-to-day life. Each site felt welcoming and familiar, representing a much healthier slice of the internet than the one constructed to farm our attention for money and greed.
This site is a place for me to practice writing about things that interest me. Writing helps process information, and it feels right to share writing. I don't track analytics or capture any of your personal data. I hope that this site exists for a long time, and someone might stumble across it in 20 or 30 years or so and finds it interesting and might start one of their own.
I don't use generative AI to construct or maintain this site, nor to write posts or any of the content within them.
Digital colophon
A colophon is that part of a book with information about publishing year, the publishing company, the type of paper its printed on, the typeface its set in, and other front matter. I admit that I found colophons on websites a little strange at first, but I now find them informative and wish more pages had them!
This site has a minimal backend written in Rust that serves the HTML pages, and the pages are are styled with plain CSS. I trialled a few different static site generators but I always found myself constrained by weird hacks to get them to work for features not strictly out of the box, and nothing felt quite as self-sufficient as making my own.
There is a little Javascript to allow users to switch between light and dark themes, and to switch between serif and sans-serif typefaces. The latter I'm just trying out. I find typography important to how I process information, and so want to give people the option, especially those that might not like reading one or the other. There is a push in some circles to avoid the use of Javascript for small, personal websites like this, but because I use it only to enhance accessibility, I think it's fine.
I write posts in HTML, giving me
complete flexibility over styling or writing equations
or adding tables or custom boxes, which no markup language
has made easier. I prefer
boring technology.
I host the code on Github, and use Github
Actions to build a docker container upon merging to main,
which is sent securely via ssh to my Hetzner server.