New website! (Again)

Well, here we are again. Another website, another attempt at pretending I have a proper online identity and a plan for it. This time, I built the whole thing by hand, without any external tools or fancy generators doing the heavy lifting for me. It feels a bit more personal that way, like I actually made something instead of dragging a template around and calling it a personality.

So why do this again? Honestly, because I got bored. Also, I wanted to spend some time making something for myself and getting better at web design without falling into the usual trap of endlessly tweaking a setup and never actually publishing anything. There is something oddly satisfying about making a page from scratch and seeing it work on the first try, even if it is tiny and rough around the edges.

I am not trying to turn this into some huge polished thing right away. I just want a place where I can write things down without needing to ask permission from a platform, a social network, or some algorithm that decides what deserves attention. A simple website feels nice for that. It is quiet, direct, and mine.

My plans for this page

At the moment, I want this site to be a place for whatever I feel like writing about. Most likely that will be technology, Linux, and the occasional rant about software, the internet, or the general weirdness of modern life. But it will always be my own words, which feels like the important part.

I also do not really want comments in the traditional blog sense. If you want to talk to me, I would rather you send me a message on Mastodon. The link is in the banner back at the home page. I will post a notice whenever I publish something new, so you can respond there if you feel like it. If you do not have a Mastodon account yet, I am not saying you must make one, but I am definitely not not saying that either.

Implementation goals

I have a few things I want to add over time, mostly because it is fun to build and because it gives this little site a bit more personality. Here is what I am thinking:

• RSS feed: I want this site to be easy to follow without turning everything into a surveillance machine. RSS is a nice, simple way to subscribe to content without giving away half your life to a company that counts your clicks. I also want it to be clean enough to read in terminal-based clients like newsboat, which I happen to like a lot.
• Music page: I am still deciding whether to put my music on YouTube or the Internet Archive. I am leaning toward the Internet Archive because I want it to be freely available, easy to download, and easy to remix or reuse however people want. That just feels more in line with how I think about creative work.
• Software page: I want a place to list the programs I make and the experiments I am working on. I have been thinking about building some Java GUI apps, and the first one I want to tackle is a small automation tool for generating RSS entries for this site. It is a simple project, but it feels useful and very me.