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Site Notes

Last updated: 2024-07

This page collects information about this website itself. It’s divided into two sections: About the contents which describes information about my posts and how I use this site; and About the Site which lists things such as the design philosophy and the tools used to produce the site. There is also a changelog here to collect notes on updates.

Table of Contents

About the contents

What I write about

Since this is a personal site, I essentially write about anything that interests me at the time. I have quite a few varied interests and I’m not blogging about anything in particular despite the fact that quite a few of my blog posts are about technology-adjacent things.

Historically, I’ve used this site as a sort of public journal or diary. Earlier posts reflect on building some indieweb software called “Brimstone” and there’ll be some meta posts about the site itself and reflecting on the technologies I use to build it. One cannot have a tech blog without writing lots of things about blogging itself.

I tend to write an update about my life every six months roughly aligning to the Summer and Winter solstices. These contain a quick status update about what’s happened and include some logs and reflections on things such as books read, music listened to etc.

Occasionally I’ll write in opinion pieces about a particular topic but I do grow and change and might not have written about a change in opinion or mindset. If you catch something that feels outdated, wrong, or silly: please contact me. I’d love to hear from you, and chat about it.

It’s also worth noting that despite my membership of a number of organisations both political and professional: I’m always writing with my own voice, and nothing I say should be taken to be representative of the views of any particular organisation.

All of the posts and pages on this site are released under the Peer Production License. This is a modified, explicitly anti-capitalist, version of the CC-NC.

It’s fairly common to release blog content under a CC license but I don’t do this because I think the name is misleading and it actually enables privatisation and permits for-profit use of the work. This thinking was largely influenced by the analysis of the folks at Telekommunisten.

The P2P Foundation wiki provides a really good summary of the Peer Production License which you should read. In essence the license stipulates that if you’re a commoner, independent worker, a co-operative or worker-owned entity, or a non-profit: you can do what you want with the content including republishing it to make money (e.g. in a book). If you’re a for-profit, capitalist, organisation that isn’t owned by its workers then you have to pay to have these rights. You don’t get anything without contributing back to the commons.

Languages

Since languages are cool and one of my interests; I’ve built this site to support pages and posts in multiple languages. The two languages I speak/write fairly effectively are English (en) and Esperanto (eo), so I’ve made a commitment to keep the main pages of this site available and up to date in each of these languages. These are:

For blog posts: each site language has its own archive of posts which are written totally separately. I sometimes write posts in multiple languages but this is not guaranteed (or indeed often). For example, I may write some posts only in Esperanto or only in English. Posts dated before 2021 are generally only available in English.

If a page or post has translations, these are accessible underneath its title via the language menu using the ISO 639-1 code for the language.

Feeds

This site supports feeds. There is a dedicated feed in multiple formats for each language available. Each feed only contains the posts I’ve written in that language.

Feeds are available in RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed format. There are links to each of the feed formats on the index page of each site language.

About the Site

Design Philosophy

Unlike reader-centric protocols such as Gemini, on the Web it’s the author who decides how content should be viewed.

The presentation and design of this site is ultimately based on my desire to embody the web that I wish to see. Minimalism aside, I feel that the web is now quite a noisy and aggressive place to be. I hate it when I visit a site and it’s basically unreadable because of all of the pop-ups, the content loads slowly because it’s being loaded via JavaScript (if it loads at all), and there’s lots of very heavy CSS.

The site’s design philosophy is inspired by the following sources:

I’ve distilled these into the following rules for myself, which also act as promises to you as a reader whose device has downloaded this page:

I have also stopped using inline links as much on pages. I now prefer placing relevant links in an unordered list underneath the paragraph. This is something I’ve picked up from reading things in Geminispace. I find this to be less visually distacting on the page and I can also add more context about the link this way. I still sometimes use inline links if it feels more appropriate, such as inside of lists. I do not plan to go back and change older blog posts which still use inline links. I will update pages to use the newer style as part of other updates as-and-when they occur.

Technical Stack

This site is a static site which is powered by Hugo. Prior to 2023, this site was powered by Jekyll and prior to 2021 this site was a dynamic site powered by my own Indieweb software called Brimstone.

To update the site I write in my text editor, generate the site, and upload the static pages to my server via an SFTP client. I don’t use any Github pages or webhooks. Partly because that’s how I like to do it, partly because I don’t see the point of relying on other infrastructure. Simple is best. The code for the site is maintained in a private git repo.

I use Hugo’s built-in multilingual mode to enable multi-language pages and posts. When I used Jekyll, I followed instructions from Anthony Granger to create a similar effect. I spun this out into a multi-language blog template for Jekyll to make it easier to reproduce, although in future I will likely use Hugo.

I write my own CSS styles and do not use any frameworks. My goals with CSS are largely to make things more readable. I try to use standard, semantic, HTML wherever possible and avoid <div> tags like the plague where I can. This also makes the CSS a lot easier and smaller.

I don’t use any form of analytics. I don’t even check if my server’s been pinged. I also do not use any JavaScript. There shouldn’t be any JavaScript running on this page; if there is then I didn’t load it.

Changelog

This changelog is to collect some information about changes I’ve made to the structure and design of the site. This can be to either the external appearance / structure or the underlying technologies.

2024-06

2024-03

2023-07

2023-05

2023-02

2022-10

2022-07

2022-05

2022-02

2022-01

2021-12