Inciting Events

For many reasons I want a personal web site. Due to—gestures wildly in the air—the collapse of social media and online spaces, I know that I need my own little haven to post the things I make and write. So here we are once again with a new personal web site!

My previous attempts didn’t really take off. I wrote a couple posts early on and dropped off almost immediately, as one does. I’m hoping to stick with it a bit more this time around. In spite of being a creative person working in a creative field, I still find it really hard to make things and just put them out in the world. Something something perfectionism, fear of criticism and rejection, etc. I’ve been working hard to worry less about what others think, to let myself enjoy the act of creation. And writing on this site will be part of my ongoing practice.

Hmm, what else… oh yes! Let’s talk tech stack.

Tech Stuff

I’m a huge tech nerd with a degree in traditional computer science. Even more importantly, I like to tinker. I’ve been an avid Linux user for just about 20 years now (oh no, I feel so old writing that), my daily driver laptop is a Framework, and I just like to learn new shit for fun all the time—you’ll never guess who has ADHD. All that to say that I’ve put a lot of thought and care into picking a stack.

I like to use a static site generator (SSG), since I don’t need a full-blown server for this site. Hugo seems to be the SSG du jour—if we ignore the many JavaScript-based ones, which I will unabashedly do. I’ve used it before and it’s absolutely wonderful. But it’s written in Go, a language that I tolerate at best. Let’s be real here, for someone as obsessedpassionate about the Rust language as me, Zola is the obvious choice of SSG for my site. It’s got all the features I need, with the added bonus that I can change it if needed.

The one downside to Zola versus Hugo is its smaller number of themes. Which means that there are less high-quality, maintained themes to pick from. I spent a day sifting through them and thankfully found tabi! It’s very nice to use, has tons of features, and the maintainer is active and responds to issues and pull requests on GitHub. I even put in a small PR to add an icon for itch.io!

As for where the pages are actually hosted, in the past I’ve used GitHub Pages. It made sense at the time since I’m already using GitHub to host my repos, it’s free, and relatively easy to use. These days, I can’t say I care for the direction GitHub’s been going these days, so instead I went with Cloudflare Pages for my new site (for now). It also gives me the opportunity to host images and other binary files from a Cloudflare R2 bucket in the future, instead of polluting my site’s git repo with them.

Last but not least, I’m using Porkbun as my domain name registrar! They’re not the cheapest, but I like the combination of features, minimal UI, and ease of use for someone tech-savvy like me. Plus their mascot is incredibly adorable, which is of top concern!

Looking Forward

So yeah, that’s about it! The plan is to have this be a central place for all things about me and stuff I’ve made. I’ll be filling in the projects and games sections and hopefully getting a professional portfolio up—I can’t keep trusting LinkedIn to exclusively hold my professional life—in the coming weeks/months/years.

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