Hello World
I never quite got into blogging, and I think it's time to change that. To write mainly for myself, to have a record of my thoughts, an outlet for my rants, and possibly, just maybe, have my explorations and thoughts be useful to others.
Previously I had started off to blog with jekyll, but never made it beyond a single post. I found the indirection of writing in markdown and having everything constantly generated via templates just not worth it. For this iteration I will stick mostly to handwritten html, and only add complexity as pain points arise. JIT over AOT complexity.
Over the years I collected links to webpages that resonated with me. One of those is that of Fabien Sanglard, from which I lifted the design more or less wholesale. I was struck by its simplicity yet attractiveness. The monospace is reminiscent of technical documents like RFC notes. Its style conveys a focus on substance and fundamentals. You'll never find the deep technical explorations that you find there, but hopefully the aesthetics will fuel my aspirations. Articles like this one on rules sing to my soul.
One interesting decision is the use of justified monospace text which works surprsingly well. Given that one of monospace fonts' chief feature is vertical alignment. But the regularity of having text vertically align at the left and right border conveys a similar regularity to that of a monospace's per-letter vertical alignment.
So here's to imitation as flattery! In my defense, I did write the html and css from scratch. Outright copying the code feels just lame, and I also want to refresh my html and css knowledge. I've also tried to use html's semantic tags where I could. Speaking of which, I want to write more on what I think html and the modern web get wrong.
I don't know if there'll ever be a comment section. Outsourcing to services like disqus just fundamentally bothers me. I also don't want to force people to register just to post, but I don't want to have to police spam either. And captchas are lame too. So yeah, don't hold your breath.
Other blogs I really like and draw inspiration from: