📖 Blogging Site

I am growing up [citation needed].

With this, comes a lot of realisations about what I value from the internet, and in particular about the things I build.

The rewrite #

My first iteration of this personal website was written in GatsbyJS, primarily as a means to show off the previous things I have built more info in this previous article.

However, I rarely wrote to this website, and I never really promoted it on other platforms for the purpose of getting views.

I also wanted to write about things that didn’t necessarily fall under the rather specific category of “project”.

As such, my website was starting to develop an identity crisis and the weakest part of the website was, frustratingly, my own writing.

I was originally hoping that this website would offer me a creative outlet where I could practise and improve my own writing style, with the auxillary goal of basically being a verbose CV to show to prospective employers or my peers.

But, GatsbyJS was simply too flexible for this purpose and in turn became a burden, drawing away my own attention from writing and providing content for this site.

This rewrite, is deliberately hands-off.

I wanted to keep the same design language, but with a further emphasis on writing, both project-style where I want to write a summary, but also to create the space for more long-form content in the future. Eventually, I would like to expand this approach to also create the space for engagement with readers in the future (once I get readers!), however this will not be a priority yet until I am confident in the content.

For now, the rewrite has resulted in removing a few thousands lines of JavaScript, leaving the entire website as just a collection of markdown files and image assets. Much nicer.

Why not [medium, dev.to, x.com, etc]? #

I want full control over my presence on the internet.

I want to be able to decide entirely by myself whether I am public, private, free for all to read, or behind a paywall.

I want to have at least a false sense of security that my writing will not be too easy to crawl for LLM’s to reproduce.

But most of all, I want to be able to go back to the old micro-web of days gone past, where each person has their own bubble on the internet. I think it’s quite a charming approach, and I hope you do too.

I will possibly start to link to my website from other platforms when I post a new article, but I want the location to stay here, on this domain.

Learning to write #

I am going to take a mini-sabbatical from work later this year, spending 4.5 months out of the U.K., working and travelling around South East Asia.

I will be leaving my personal laptop here, only taking my phone, camera and a notebook. I’m hoping to teach myself how to enjoy the creative process. If that works, You’ll be hearing more from me soon!