rikard.me/blog/006.txt                                Fri 22 Dec, 2023


                       One Year of this Website


It's been a year since I first started this website.

I originally made it because I wanted to share my grumpy-old-man
thoughts about Pentiment someplace that wasn't Steam, as I didn't feel
like what I had written was a review.

It wasn't the first time I started a website.  Throughout the years
I've had a number of blogs.  They all served the same purpose, being
places for me to put content about things I had taken an interest in
during that period.

In the early 2010s I had an art blog on Tumblr.  When I was younger I
used to draw by hand, but in 2010 I began doing digital art.  Most
artists I liked were on Tumblr, and so it was a natural place for me
to go.

During the Snowden era I had a blog where I wrote about digital
privacy.  I wrote an introductory article on free software, how the
movement came to be, what free software is and why it's important
today.

In 2015, Richard Stallman used to have a note on his website about how
Twitter was becoming harder to use anonymously, and to let him know if
there were any developments with regards to this.  It used to be that
you could register a Twitter account using Tor without having to give
a phone number, but I noticed one day that you no longer could.  I
wrote an article about this, published it, sent it to Richard, and was
happy to see it linked on his site.

Around 2016 I had a blog where I wrote game reviews, my gimmick being
to intentionally miss the point of the game.  One of my favourite
reviews to this day was my review of The Caribbean Sail, which I
presented as a fishing simulator.  I liked the idea, and I've had
plans of doing the same for Stardew Valley and Fire Emblem: Three
Houses, writing seemingly serious reviews but presenting fishing as
the core gameplay mechanic.

I've had more sites, but they weren't all too interesting, and I've
mainly forgotten them.

I kick myself for not keeping copies of any of the content I
published.  For some reason I treated it as if it was ephemeral,
non-meaningful.  Youthful stupidity, I suppose.

Even if the topics have been different, a running thread for all my
blogs have been their short lifespan.  None lasted more than a few
months.  They were all hosted on servers and used frameworks which I
did not have full control over.

I've always liked coding, even if I haven't ever done anything serious
with that interest.  The first language I ever dabbled in was PHP,
after my brother showed me an online course in 2009-ish.  I'm not a
fan of the modern web, its needless bloat and all too often braindead
design.  I knew that if I was going to have a long-term website, I
wanted to make it myself, the way I wanted it.

And so that's how this site started.  I got a VPS and read up on
apache, which to my surprise were a lot simpler than I had imagined it
to be.

In early 2023 I was relearning GNU, having spent (too) many years
away.  I was taking a lot of notes, and realised that some of them
might be useful to others who aren't comfortable spending hours
digging through documentation.  I touched up a few of them and made
them into guides which I then published here.

The site's been through a number of design iterations, but I've mostly
kept to my core principle of keeping it simple.

The last design overhaul was done in December, and I love this current
iteration.  I barely use HTML anymore, other than creating indeces
(the files are called 'index.html' for a reason).  The entire site
uses less than 15 lines of CSS.

I've always written my articles in plaintext (in Emacs), and whenever
I've published them I've had to go through them, painstakingly adding
tags and editing CSS to make sure they format well.

What I'm doing now is what I should have been doing all along.  I'm
simply publishing my original text files.  It's friction free, and it
feels so good.  I write an article in Emacs, put it on the server and
then update the index.  Boom! done!  The documents come out looking
exactly as I want them to.  I can't edit their appearance with CSS, so
I no longer end up wasting time on that crap.

I am very happy with this place, it finally feels like I have a home
in this digital wasteland.