Hello World.
I wonder how many times I have written those words now? How many times have a written this introduction post to my blog? Maybe three... four times? It’s hard to say. I never keep records of my written words or these experiments, I can often be a very unsentimental person with an objective to always move forwards through life without a care to preserving where I have come from, or what memories I have. It’s an instinct that I’m disinclined to continue, perhaps in part because now my life feels like it is moving with some speed, where the difference between one year to the next is monumental and I feel that these next few years could prove very interesting personally.
Very interesting to me at least. I imagine reading about my life for others will largely be a laborious chore, in which you sit there and read text on your device from a Scotsman that is maybe trying a bit too hard to work in the word “laborious” or “disinclined” into his writings, but then is it truly the internet if you are not reading someones pretentious attempt at “writing” that is perhaps a couple of paragraphs larger than it ever needed to be to get their point across? Probably not, but you would also expect some production value behind the website that is delivering this “fresh” content. Not such a barren hellscape, that offers no visual candy, no popup asking you to subscribe to my newsletter or join my Discord server. “Join My Discord Server” dear lord, I wonder if in ten years time that will sound as antiquated as talking about chatting over MSN Messenger is now. A frightening thought to me at least.
I’m already at the third paragraph and I haven’t really been talking about the website, so lets fix that. First off you will notice that there really isn’t much going on around here and that’s intentional. I’m not gearing this to drive maximum engagement of my content or to start a business or anything like that, I have built this website to essentially be my own little corner of the internet. I have had a Digital Ocean Droplet sitting around not doing much of anything since Rolling Retro went on hiatus over the summer (the droplet hosted our Teamspeak server for remote gaming sessions.) and I consistently kept forgetting to destroy the instance. This site is purely static and minimal, using just HTML and CSS, there is no JavaScript at play here or any third party analytical library, this is just a pure clean light website that won’t end up draining your battery. Part of the reason I would end up deleting my blogs was because they always felt a bit too heavy having a CMS felt overkill when I was so very rarely writing any posts and while my last go around was with a static site generator, it was still a little bit annoying just because the process of setting up some of those generators and tweaking them then pushing changes could often be a tad laborious or just plain fiddly. I haven’t necessarily removed the fiddlyness aspect with this approach, but I like the idea of this being a pretty light website just parked here that someone could end up stumbling across. I have little care if the server got hijacked or something, the content is ultimately backed up remotely so spinning this site back up would just be a case of destroying it and recreating in 5-10 mins. In some ways this site will be me shouting into the void and perhaps it will allow me to reflect on my life changes as the years go by. We shall see!