— This site has now seen the fourth redesign in its few months of existence. This one is very much inspired by Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction, ca. 2011, to the point that you might call it a copy.
The many redesigns of the site show that it fulfils its purpose as a garden, a place for experimentation. It reflects my interests at the moment: Exploring CSS layout features, web design websites from a past era, and trying to build a lasting place to express myself.
I still need to clean up a couple of posts, but I’ll have enough time, three or maybe four weeks, until the next major revamp.
— I did yet another redesign of the website over the weekend. It wasn’t necessary, but I had a couple of hours with nothing to do, and I didn’t like the previous iteration.
The new design’s narrow page layout, header image, borders, and background patterns are a nod to web design from 2005 when the internet was still fun. The colour scheme is inspired by the movie posters Saul Bass designed in the 1960s and 1970s.
On top of the new design, there are a couple of additions:
JSON Feeds for all posts and tags.
A subscribe page offering ways to follow updates to the blog via JSON and RSS feeds.
An archive page that lists the most popular tags. I’ll add monthly archives and a search in the coming weeks.
— I migrated the blog from a static page rendered by Jekyll to a more heavy-handed, custom-built blogging engine using Django.
While I’m a proponent of statically rendered websites for their speed and security, maintaining a blog that is updated several times a day is arduous. Yes, there are ways to simplify publishing through custom scripts or content-management systems bolted on top of the Git workflow. But creating posts with custom scripts still requires committing and pushing every time. I tried NetlifyCMS for a while, but it’s a bug-ridden application that introduces strange hidden characters into posts, and editing content is a drag because the cursor has developed a life on its own.
These issues can be fixed, but my goals with this website are bigger than frequent updates.
I want this site to be part of the IndieWeb, a community of independent content publishers. I want to accept and send Webmentions, post from external editors via Mircopub, and integrate my reading and writing workflow that allows me to create posts from a custom feed reader. Achieving these goals is nearly impossible when you manage a site using a static page generator unless you want to rely on more third-party tools.
I want to control every aspect of this website. If it hums along, I did a good job; if it’s broken, I broke it. It’s a place for experimentation with new technology, to learn how to build a web of independent websites and understand the technology that drives it.
All this is much more work than running a simple static website and occasionally typing words into a markdown file. But it will be worth it for the sake of creation. This blog is a garden that I want to nurture and maintain. I want a place for my own to built and design software in a way that isn’t prescribed by client requirements or constrained by the design decisions of a blogging software somebody else built.