About this blog (a 'first post' of sorts)

First off, hello and welcome! After much pondering and many delays I've finally started to kick off a blog!

About the blog#

This is a home for everything that makes my mind tick. I plan to post tutorials, long-form articles, trip reports, travel guides, short tidbits of things I find interesting, and more! I set out building this site with two goals in mind:

• To build somewhere I can be myself, and express any and all my interests in one place
• To express those interests on a platform and in a manner that I control

Platforms like Twitter or Mastodon are great for posting short tidbits and sharing them with others; likewise, blogging platforms like Medium make it easy for anyone to share long-form written content. Most of these platforms excel at a single type of content or topic, but I plan on sharing a wide variety content and formats that don't necessarily fit into the structure of a single platform. Also, posting everything about me and my interests to social platforms feels both (for lack of a better term) "loud" and all but guarantees its sale and aggregation into some large dataset. I'm not insinuating that content posted to this site "can't be scraped" or will never wind up in some massive LLM's training data, but at least all the data is still firmly in my control. I built this site with portability in mind, so if the platform hosting this site disappeared tomorrow it could be redeployed elsewhere in a few clicks. No single corporate collapse will keep this page offline forever.

Also I'm a verbose person, consider this your warning.

The site's technicals#

This site was created using Zola, a static site generation (SSG) tool that ships a as a single binary. It's similar to tools like Jekyll or Hugo. It boasts full compliance with the CommonMark specification, syntax highlighting for code blocks, easy cross-article and anchor linking, and more. Content (such as this article's text!) is written in Markdown, and template files are used to format it into the page you're viewing now. Currently I'm using the serene theme for Zola, but the design of the site will likely continue to change in the future. Hopefully, only for the better.

This site is currently hosted by Github Pages, as it's free and requires minimal ongoing maintenance. I currently use Github as my primary source control server, however I've toyed with the idea of moving personal projects to SourceHut or a self-hosted Gitea instance (which I've done in the past).

I won't tell you to go out and adopt Zola if you're already using another SSG, but it's the one I clicked with the most when I was researching options for building this site.