i've given this a try a couple of times before and lost interest, but my most successful attempt was back when i was in uni and writing html by hand, which is what you're reading right now, handwritten html.
the idea that i needed a static blog generator or a proper cms or something swish and "correct" has prevented me from actually doing this i've realised. but that's all a massive rip. i don't need a mysql db to post words to the internet. markdown is not that much easier to write than html, but i do need to convert it to html before it's actually useful. that's actually less convenient than writing plain html. i've been writing html for over 20 years now, i remember being taught the basics in high school. why should i draft in another markup language? i especially don't need a scripting language taking arbitrary inputs from the internet. the static blog people are partially right, but you also don't need jekyll or hugo or whatever.
just write the html tilde
a couple of rules for this blog:
the font thing was something i struggled with because my main driver these days is an x13 thinkpad running debian and the default browser fonts on linux are dogshit. i've specified in my <style/> block to use FreeSerif and FreeSans as the default fonts if they are installed, which they are by default on debian 12, if this looks like shit to you then try installing the urw++ fonts. on apple platforms we get a nice helvetica/times combo, i don't care how this looks on windows, get fucked. if you have an android phone please let me know if the fonts look bad, but i bet the google defaults are reasonable.
so how come no external stylesheets? basically i just want this to be a bit of a time capsule, if i update my website's design i actually don't want my old posts to get updated. i want my 2025 posts to look like 2025, if i get a hankering for a change then let the record show that i changed my mind. i kinda want this to be the antithesis to my cuties dot cloud microblogging, which autodeletes all content older than 90 days. on mastodon i don't have to live with any of my decisions, here i'm putting up statements i have to stand by, and a stylesheet is a statement.
it's a big girl blog. i don't know if i can call it a blog seeing as there's no rss, but whatever, read my webbed log please. it's literally just a shell script that concatenates a post with a template, i then sftp the output to my server. i've turned indexing on, so instead of needing a search function or a "feed" of recent posts you can browse them by date. i might even use a symlink later so you can visit the most recent posts easily, but i'll only need that if i keep writing stuff.
what will i write? i'm hoping to write about videogames, i quit streaming because i realised i was volunteering for the amazon corporation by doing so and i wanted no part of that anymore. i'm married to 3cr, if i wanna broadcast i'll broadcast there. but i do wanna share some of my ideas about games, in a fairly low effort way, i think about these things a lot and have wanted to make gaming a creative outlet again, but with less of the youcky parasocial "followers/subscribers/join my discord" bullshit. i'm a broadcaster, i put the content out there in a unidirectional way, if you know me then you know how to talk to me already, and we can talk about my stuff if you like, but i'm done being an internet microcelebrity or whatever, that stuff is so rotten. i'm planning to play a game every month and post about it. i've already finished two this year so i'm hoping to write a couple of short pieces about those.
outside of that i'm hoping to write a little bit about audio production, i've been mixing bands lately at 3cr and we have some very old analogue gear and broadcast in mono, a lot of modern mixing techniques are irrelevant to us and i'd like to write a bit about our idiosyncracies and mono mixing in particular. also the occassional tech thing, i'm thinking of writing some software to automate the recording of zoom interviews at the radio station, and hoping to play around with NetBSD in a hobbyist way at home.
how about the downloads section? i'm hoping to fill that out some more, for now it's just archives of my radio show but we'll see if i can host anything else interesting down the track. in terms of uninteresting stuff to host i'm going to try and mirror all of the free software stuff i download like *BSD install sets and stuff. don't know how useful that will be but why not. archiving feels important now of days.
if any of this sounds good then please stay tuned, hopefully i'll post more stuff real soon!