Introduction

Purpose

There are a few things I'm looking to accomplish with this site.

  1. Be a kind of lab notebook, where I can store my notes, project ideas, instructions to self, etc.

  2. Something blog-ish: I want to, for example, write down what I think about movies and TV shows I watch. The New York Film Festival is coming up, and I'll be going to a lot of it.

  3. Repository for updates: When I left the G, I promised to stay in touch, and I created a sign-up list that has hundreds of people on it. My thought was to send them a brief update or two, which I'll keep archived on this site. Arguably, this is just a flavor of blog, but whatever.

UX

I wanted the site to look good, on desktop and on mobile, and be fast and responsive; a static site and something simple were essential.

Simple

I took a hard look at hugo, but it's overkill. It clearly can do everything I would ever want, there's even native support for org mode files. But what I wanted was something with great defaults, minimal setup time, that easily let me use the authoring and scripting tools I'm comfortable with, and I didn't want to spend a zillion hours finding the right theme, learning a sophisticated templating language, that sort of thing. I may go back to hugo one day, if my needs outgrow what I'm using now; the "stack" (I am somwehat embarrassed to call my tech selection a stack) is simpler (well, in some sense of that word: it combines tools written in haskell, lua, deno/typescript, python, and dart, and maybe more that I haven't uncovered yet).

Cost

I wanted to have good free hosting options. Github pages looks promising.