Why do this?
I recently told someone that I didn't want to blog because I'd rather have a conversation with people live, preferably during a stream where I can elaborate with more nuance than a text chat or within comments to a blog post.
A lot of content is certainly served best with viewer interactions. But there is also content that just doesn't really entertain a live audience, content that is better consumed at the chosen pace of the reader and where the author has taken proper time to formulate their thoughts. For a time I tried doing some of that on Discord servers, but long-form text doesn't really work in "chat rooms" like that, even with features like (fake) forums and threads.
And so I've come to the conclusion that maybe a blog is still a good idea. And not just for that reason but also because the modern internet has become a place of complex applications masquerading as text documents that do more than they should and do it far less efficiently than they ought.
And perhaps even more importantly, I regularly find myself bemoaing how so much information on the modern web has become hostage to unsearchable, unarchiveable "black hole" applications. So much information is shared on Discord, completely unreacheable from any search engine except their own -- which is subpar at best. And getting the information out is prohibitively difficult.
I share a lot of information during my intermittent Twitch streams, and while you can find recordings of most of them on my YouTube channel, they're practically impossible to search.
So while I complain about this current state of affairs somewhat frequently I don't do anything about it, other than contribute to the problem with my inaction. Which is why I want to attempt reintroducing a little bit of sanity back to the web in perhaps the least-sane way possible in 2023: By writing searchable, indexable, archiveable HTML by hand and making a homepage. With a blog.
Comments section?
Not worth the time investment for now. So if you have questions or strong feelings about anything you find here you can email me, or check out the links page for other means of interacting. If it seems relevant to share with the world and you're okay with that, I'll manually append it to the relevant page.
Tech stack?
Just manual, plain handwritten HTML and CSS. There's also a tiny bit of optional JS for the theming color-swap functionality (see the top-right corner of the page). The only magic aside from that is the git repository and the automagic of publishing anything merged into the master branch directly to an Azure static app instance.
That probably comes off as archaic and possibly even backwards to some, and I would likely have agreed only a few years back.
It's not for a lack of options and I certainly have experience with everything from static site builders to CMS's. I've used and written both kinds many times over the years. No the reason is simply that with that experience I've learned that if you have the skillset to write and manage raw HTML and CSS, then it is the best option to produce textual content for the web. Crazy, right?
I came to this realization whilst reflecting on all the failed blogs I've started and eventually moved on from over the years. Some lasted a while, but most laid dormant from the first or second post onward. It wasn't because they were hard to maintain, per se, but rather that spending a lot of time setting up a system to write content before you've written much content at all turns out to be a huge waste of time.
And not only that, but any system you do create to wrangle "easier" to write text into HTML will inevitably restrict you. In many cases those restrictions are important and good things. For example if you want to let marketers write posts for your corporate website but wish to avoid them pasting in raw Word text and completely screw up the entire layout and professionalism of your website.
I am no marketing person; try as I might to market my own hobby projects, I am simply awful at it. Nor is this a corporate website. And finally, I know better than to paste garbage, and I do know how to format HTML. And I'm not half bad at CSS despite my many misgivings with the implied "Cascading" side of it.
The strength of manually writing all the markup is that I can easily write any type of content I want, and format it however I need, without any prep work. And this is key because I don't really know what I'll post yet, but I do know it will likely be varied. There is likely going to be images small and large, both static and moving. There's also a good chance I'll embed videos and possibly even audio as well. And the formatting to make it look right depends a lot on each article's topic.
Instead of trying to shoehorn all content into one system or layout, I want to treat this website and the blog section as what the web was intended to be. Glorious, varied and malleable HyperText.
Written in April 2023