A New Look
I finally got around to updating this website! The old layout, while minimalistic and modern, didn’t sit right with me. As it was, it was just a fancy redirect for employers to look at, with no real substance to it. If I’m paying for a cool domain name, I better get the most out of it.
Recently I discovered something called Gemini, an internet protocol that is akin to Gopher or https. Its entire premise is a return to the internet before my time, a smallnet, where the only files being transfered are text and images. There are no search engines, and the way to find new content is to literally surf the web and find read the blogs of the people you find interesting. To me, who has grown up with content being algorithmically served on a silver platter, this was such a refereshing mode of consuming content, and more importantly, learning. Where sites like Reddit and Youtube have to condense and trim a lot of information to prioriotize engagement, microblogs on gemini let me walk the same path that the author was taking, and soak in the view. It also feels more personal, since instead of reading things by topic, I have to read things by creator, and I can really get a sort of personal connection to the author just by reading their posts.
(I’m sure you’ve thought of Twitter as the solution to this but using http, but it really isn’t for me. The layout of the site/app is terrible, even for a zoomer, and I can’t seem to find anything that interests me. With gemini, there’s the occasional link made by the author that’s got a good chance of being interesting, since you already trusted the author with your time in the post in the first place. How do I find things on Twitter? The same problem happens to me on Mastodon, too.)
I could have continued with the old theme and actually made blog posts, but looking at my thoughts nicely formatted made it feel cold and inhuman. Sure, at the end of the day it was text on a page, but the clutter of unneccessary CSS still felt like a hurdle when it came to communicating you, the reader. I chose to compromise with this theme: nostyleplease. This lets me get as close to just html on a page without having to touch CSS to make it, say, center correctly on mobile devices.
All of this is to say, I’m happy that my website looks simpler, and expect to see more blog posts soon.