This is the third iteration of my website. In the first one I used Jekyll and GitHub pages, with some hack-y way of doing a blog based on R markdown documents. I moved from there to using Hugo and blogdown, which streamlined the R markdown blog aspect a lot. However that whole process of having an RStudio project for the site and having to launch RStudio, etc., etc., to make even the slightest change to the site made me not want to do updates.
I decided to rebuild the site as simply as possible, wanting to go back to how it used to be when the internet wasn’t shit and I had a GeoCities website.
The web 1.0
version is designed to have minimal bloat. It’s all markdown that I edit
within my existing vim
workflow. The site is built entirely as static .html
using a
python script that does some light preprocessing before running pandoc, the greatest tool known to man.
The pandoc output is then glued together with the header, menu, and
footer .html, these parts being the same for all pages.
adding some header and footer info. This page should work fine in raw,
unstyled .html; the style sheet makes only small
adjustments. You can see it’s effect on various elements on the meta page.
The most complicated thing on this site is that I import KaTex to render math. I only do this because some of the shittier browsers don’t support MathML.
My blog was inactive for very long periods of time because I felt that I should make substantive posts. What I want instead is to have a little digital garden with a lower threshold for publishing. As the link says:
A collection of essays, notes, and half-baked explorations I’m always tending to.
The biggest drawback with what I have now is that there is no system in place for an R markdown-based posts. This isn’t because it’s hard to implement; it’s because of the aesthetics of the resulting build process/workflow. It just doesn’t feel slippy. This means that I will not bring back any R-markdown-based posts from the old blog, unless I suddenly feel like I’m missing one. Any similar long-form content under the current system will be more of a hand-crafted, locally sourced thing.
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