About this site

Last updated: 2021-10-20

In college, I came across Joel On Software. I spent many hours on my back porch reading his articles. I loved the relaxed writing style and helpful info. Joel on Software led to Coding Horror which led to Stevey's Blog Rants which led to many other programming blogs.

In 2017, I read a blog post theorizing that iPhones are turning us less into producers of information and more of consumers (sadly I can’t find the link to the post). The insight inspired me to try to produce more and consume less information. My first idea was to create a blog in the same vein as the ones I love to read.

In addition to being a way to produce more, I thought it might help with other areas I struggle with. I've always been a weak writer. I avoided writing in school at nearly any cost. Slowly I’ve realized how fundamental being a good writer is to communicate my ideas. I hope that by writing more I'll get better at it. I also know that to write a post I will need to spend time researching and ironing out ideas. Reading someone else's article is a good way to learn something but the information rarely sticks in my head. I'm hoping writing my own posts will crystalize all of the information in a deeper way. Finally, keeping a log of my thoughts and being able to see how they change over time is fun and a good way to reflect.

Actually creating the blog took longer than I expected. I started using Hugo. I found the templating language cumbersome and I didn't enjoy figuring it out. I then messed around with a few others before settling on Pelican. The site is purposely not very complicated. I think nearly all websites should be less complicated and my blog needs no complications. The source code is available here if you're curious.

I use analytics provided by Fathom Analytics. Fathom is privacy focused and GDPR compliant. I pay $14 a month in an effort to support a privacy focused analytics company and to encourage the exchange of money instead of data. You can see the analytics I can see by visiting this public dashboard.

I had no real use for tracking on my site so I have removed it. I still think Fathom is good if you must have tracking.

For me, writing articles is a terribly slow endeavor. No banging out thousands of words in an evening with a glass of wine like Steve. I hope to become intelligent enough to write longer pieces with interesting thoughts that explain a topic in-depth (like this). I also plan on writing some "simple" short articles with small ideas that may have ended up on Twitter if I used it (like this).

In the future, I plan on writing my own static site generator and using it for this site. I think writing it in Lisp would be a fun exercise and a good way to learn Lisp.