Total website redesign

2024-10-02

As you can see, I have completely redesigned this website. I've switched from writing all the html css and rss by hand to using a static site generator. I've been getting more and more sick of twitter and the surfacenet for a while now, and I intend to retire my twitter account and switch to posting here instead with more frequent, shorter posts. The reason I haven't done that up to this point is that writing blog posts in html is a bit of a pain, and hand writing rss is even more of a pain, so I've been pushed to only update my blog when I feel like I have something more detailed to say which specifically requires long-form text as its medium. Switching to a site generator means I can write my posts in a simple markdown, and it will update my rss automatically which is really quite nice. So, look foreward to more frequent posts. Once again this is a good time to remind you to subscribe to the rss (or atom now!) feeds in the footer of this page, it's the best way to keep up with my posts.

I like to keep this site minimal to the point of brutalism, for both technical and aesthetic reasons, so I was looking around for a site generator that would meet my needs, but not actively. Just in the background as I surfed the net I was keeping on the lookout for something that might meet my usecase. I was reading through the newest edition of the OpenBSD Webzine https://webzine.puffy.cafe/issue-17.html and came accross this article: https://btxx.org/posts/OpenBSD_is_a_Cozy_Operating_System/. I thought to myself that this individual's website was very nicely designed, and lo and behold, at the bottom of the page I saw the text, "built with wruby". As it turns out, this individual by the name of "bt" had written their own static site generator in ruby. I thought this seemed like a great fit for me. As I browsed this person's site a little more, I came accross another one of their projects, "barf" (blogs are really fun) https://git.sr.ht/~bt/barf,A very similar site builder but written in shell rather than ruby. Now I am completely unfamiliar with ruby, where as I have some experience with shell. So I decided that barf would be better for me, in case I needed to modify the script to suit my needs. So I rebuilt my entire site using barf and I have to say I'm quite happy with how it came out, although I'll probably make a few minor tweaks in the future.

In copying over all of my old blog posts, I realised that some of them are shockingly bad, written at very strange periods of my life which don't represent me, or they make some glaring error that I'm not comfortable leavin up. You may email me if you really need to read one of my deleted blog posts, but I intend to remake them better in the future if they deserve to exist at all. For now, you can expect more regular, shorter posts from me on here. Shouts out to bt for making barf I am really liking it so far.