Hello

It’s been a long while since I last updated my website, but between the enshittification of twitter, AI bullshit, and my accidentally signing 24mo contract for a VPS that ended up being way cheaper than the EC2 instance I had, now seemed like a good time to spend some time figuring that out.

A new stack.

Previously I was using a homebrew fileserver I wrote in rust which worked fine, but now I just want something that works and that I won’t have to relearn every time IETF deprecates an ACME version. Originally my goal was to push myself to have as minimal and fast a stack as possible - and I think that was achieved, but it was inflexible and hard to pick back up and extend.

So this time I’m running a caddy + hugo combo, which so far I’m pretty impressed with! Caddy being almost zero config for fully https-first file-serving, but still with the option for more complex behaviour is Very Nice. Not only can I just caddy run to see my website with https no less, the linux repo packages also come with systemd units ready to go - so setting up the server side of things was shockingly trivial. nginx could never.

Hugo was a little more involved to figure out, but is ultimately just a pretty solid templating engine. I already had a stylesheet to work from which I’m happy with, so I didn’t bother trying to figure out its themes or anything. But really all I need is just something that can turn markdown into something I can push to my server, and that’s what it is.

Also Very Nice is both applications being fully cross platform and requiring effectively zero faff to set up. I dev on both windows and linux, so having consistent, crossplatform first tools is very important for me. I’m not a big golang person, but props where props are due - so far I’m pretty impressed.

The internet is about (c|sh)aring.

I’ve also been wanting to get back into blogging too. There’s stuff I find myself talking about a lot which would be much better suited to a long form format than yet another deranged discord thread.

As much as I Don’t Love Writing, I do very much have stuff I want to write about. I want to write about opengl and how we teach it to beginners. I want to write about my own projects and the cool things I think I’m doing with them.

And my hope is that I’ll be able to write things that help people learn about the things I spent years enough learning, or maybe give people ideas about approaches to problems that maybe aren’t so common in tutorials and co.

But maybe I won’t and that’s fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Even if that’s not what happens, maybe it will at the very least give me space to reflect on my own projects. Who knows.

Regardless, I’m hoping this time around I can build something that I’ll actually want to work on more consistently.

A web I want a part of.

Zooming out a bit, there are some more matter-of-principle reasons I wanted to rebuild my website. Largely, I feel bad about how the web is currently.

I’ve been craving an escape from the ad-laden, same-shade-of-blue boring, engagement baiting Same Five-ish Websites for a long time. I feel like I’ve tried a lot of alternatives, but always with extremely limited success.

Centralised. Decentralised. Twitter-like. Tumblr-like. Social platforms built on weird, niche tech completely sidestepping the traditional web stack completely. Nothing quite cutting it.

Bluesky seems at the very least to be gaining some decent traction now that a Certain Someone has managed to destroy twitter completely, but lets be honest, it is much more of a bandaid than a solution.

Ultimately what I want is a web built by actual people, and thankfully the Indie Web seems to be catching on slowly. The Indie Web though feels like an actual solution. There’s an incredible, web of creative, playful, and truly personal websites on platforms like neocities built on little more than static html, gifs and Hyperlinks.

The webrings of yore are back, as are the static pages of “links to stuff I think is cool”. It’s a very simple, very Web 1.0 approach to the internet, but we’ve had a few decades to enjoy Web 2.0, and I don’t think we’ve really managed to beat it.

I’ve been a part of the XXIIVV webring for a good long while now. And in the interest of trying to push more folks to follow along I’ve also started a new small webring with a friend of mine called 🧊 Club (Cool Club), and definitely on the look out for more cool circles to be a part of.

In any case, that is the web I would much rather be a part of.

A True Web comprising Cool Folks who do Things and share links to Other Folks who potentially Also Do Things.

No non-chonological feeds, No advertisers, No algorithm. No Corporate Overlords. No bots well akchually-ing us at every turn.

Just Folks doin stuff and writing about it.

In any case.

There is no conclusion or grand take-away to be had from this post; I just wanted to start my blog with something. And with no longer-form posts figured out yet, why not write about the blog itself :)

It is by no means Done, and I will likely be tweaking and rearranging it for quite a while yet. But yeah. That’s it really.

Here’s to a more interesting web I guess.