Hey, remember blogging?
It's been a rough few years. That feels pretty impossible to unpack right now, and I'm trying to get shit done today, so let's move on.
I've been thinking for many years now about spinning up a new website and blog to get back to putting stuff on the web in a way I felt good about. Things that have had me feeling bad:
- putting stuff into megacorporate platforms (e.g. twitter) where both the stability of my content and the ethical tolerability of the owners are always in question
- self-hosting stuff with high-maintenance software (e.g. self-hosted wordpress) that I know I won't consistently have the energy and focus to maintain against script kiddies and so on
- putting a lot of effort into putting text and imagery into abstract database formats that it'll take a secondary chunk of work to retrieve and rebuild in my own space, in my own preferred human-readable archive structure
The web is not currently getting any less stupid on that first and second point (see: Elon Musk's tenure as owner of twitter; Mark Zuckerberg's latest flopsweat dive into full-throated MAGA toe-sucking and Anti-Woke posturing; Matt Mullenweg having an ongoing goddam tantrum/meltdown to the dismay of literally everyone else in the Wordpress ecosystem), and the third point has been a long-running struggle between my own archivist instincts and the path of much less resistance that has been using other people's tools and databases and platforms.
So: here's a new blog, and art archive, and whatever else I decided to put here, built using a static-site generator called Eleventy. It's giving me the chance to feel good about these things:
- it's self-hosted -- all of the stuff on this site lives on my own hard drive, and gets published out to simple web hosting when I feel like updating.
- the Eleventy software is simple and lives locally on my box; the version of this website that it generates and I upload is nothing but pre-rendered html and image files, no dynamically executed js or php or anything else that presents an attack surface to hostile actors. No maintenance to worry about slacking off on. Limits how computationally clever the site can be, but I want the site to be dumb as a rock there, so, not a problem.
- I can structure the data underlying this website however I like, and how I'm working on structuring it is as, as much as possible, plain text, limited metadata, and everything organized into date-based directory structure that someone (including future me, trying to get something done with it) can navigate and consume even just with a basic OS file explorer. I can put stuff here first, and know where it goes, and that is comforting.
I've got a lot of work to do on the site, but the framework is already pretty much where I want it to be: what's left is about 95% getting content from other places relocated here, and maybe 5% faffing with CSS and Eleventy configuration stuff and cursing to myself. I'm looking forward to it.
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Quietly struggling with the magnitude of terribleness