First Post

Around the 23rd of February 2019 I started building this site, mostly as an attempt to see if I could. That’s how a lot of my small coding projects start, as an attempt to figure out how something could be done, and most of them stop around when a proof of concept has formed. Because by that time I have a decent idea of how it is done and he remainder is just work. Not the fun figuring stuff out part but the more boring tedious work of making something that is somewhat complete and the fiddly handling of edge cases.

Yet this is starting to look kinda done. There’s a site with a design that doesn’t look completely terrible, something that was harder to achieve than I expected. It has a metalsmith based script that automatically builds everything including the navigation tree and tags based on nothing but a bunch of markdown files in a simple directory structure. (Set up this way so it plays nice with my favourite markdown editor.) Sure the site doesn’t really contain much of anything yet but that’s the next step.

I’m not actually sure yet what I want to use it for but a couple of things have come to mind:

• I have a hard time writing text, just putting words on paper tends to take a long time (so far this little bit of text has taken me ~45 minutes). And I recently stumbled upon the luminous idea that you might have to practice writing in order to get good at it, who would’ve thought? Good reason to have a blog type thing, to practice writing.
• There are a bunch of books I own but haven’t read. Maybe I could read them and then write something about it on my site, just as an extra motivation to read them, and so I actually have something to write about.
• Keep notes about random stuff I might need to reference later. (I figure this is part of the reason why people write guides to things on their personal blogs.) I actually already have some notes on systemd services up.
• There’s this pnp rpg called Ironsworn that has a solod mode that I’ve been meaning to give a try, I could host it here.
• The aforementioned markdown editor, Zettlr, has turned me onto this knowledge management system Zettlkasten that looks quite interesting. As far as I understand you use it to build a tagged and cross-referenced network of notes that you use to keep track of your research and stuff. It should be quite easy to host it here.
• A good number of interesting thinkers I like seem to publish and develop their ideas through blogs and articles. I could try to do the same, with emphasis on the develop part of course.

So plenty of options. And hell it’s not a total waste even if I don’t really end up doing much of anything with this site, after all I did have some fun figuring it all out.