First of all: hello, remember me? It’s been quite a while. Lots has happened since last we chatted. If I’m being honest, you’re likely reading this because you read something else here, and you’re trying to figure out what makes me tick, in which case: welcome!
There’s too much to cover for the intervening time, which will likely get covered as needed when needed, but for now: I’m planning to get back onto writing on various topics, and to avoid some of the things that got me hung up before, I’m refactoring the site. What you’re seeing is the result.
But first, some background:
Way back in ancient history, when blogging was a shiny new thing, I started this site using an interesting publishing system called blosxom. The idea was to post using text files with a simple convention, combined with a CGI script (in Perl, because of course) which enabled simple commenting and pingback from other posters. This had an appeal that never went away, though the software didn’t work out; the last commit was in 2010. My last post to that system was in 2003, and you can see those old posts here.
Moving on from that, I set up WordPress, which at the time was an exciting new blogging framework that looked like it had legs. (Boy, was that an understatement.) The problem with WordPress was that it was way too much. I didn’t need what turned out to be a fairly complex and maintenance-heavy framework for a simple blog. The last post to that system was in 2015, and you can see those old posts here.
Fast forward to a few months ago. I’m in the process of changing out a few things, and decided to see what the state of the old WordPress site was. It wasn’t great; something broke authentication, and I couldn’t get to the WordPress admin page, although the site was still up. Faced with the prospect of fixing a broken and complicated WordPress instance, I decided to just mirror the whole thing into a static HTML hierarchy and shut down the active WordPress site. This worked out OK, but would clearly not suffice for doing anything useful with the site besides maintain it as a living museum.
So, here we are. I’ve switched to using Hugo to manage the site, which is a popular static site generator that uses Markdown as its input format. Simply writing Markdown files as a post format reminds me of the old blosxom days, and while it’s not a good system for many people, it’s a great system for me.
As of today, the new site is pretty stripped down, which is largely fine from my perspective. I’ll have more thoughts later about my newfound philosophy on writing in general and this site in particular, and I’m sure we will expand the capabilities of the site as needed. But for now, it is what it is.