Welcome to my website

Published 2024-09-07

I created a website when I was in high school, but abandoned it after a few years. In the intervening years, I realized that I need some presence on the Internet, especially to serve as a place to contact me or find out about work that I have done. I do not use social media in general, so this website is a better place to access information about me or work that I have done.

Blog

Previously I would have balked at the idea of writing a blog. I did not think that I had anything to write that somebody else did not already write better. Nowadays, I realize that there are many subjects that I can cover that others have overlooked or did not know about. I intend to cover various overlooked subjects or anything I think that I can provide new insight into on my own schedule when time permits.

Website design

All design is about tradeoffs. I wanted a website that I did not need to spend much time maintaining, focused on the content, but nonetheless is visually distinctive. In "good, fast, cheap, pick two", I picked "good" and "cheap".

I tried out Zola and Hugo as static site generators. Both compile to a single binary, which was my only requirement. In the end, I used Zola because it seems to have a more gradual learning curve. It actually took me a surprising amount of time to compile both since I had to manually install Rust and Go compilers due to both Zola and Hugo requiring quite recent versions of Rust and Go respectively.

I created my own theme in Zola since I wanted a visually distinctive website. That said, I adopted a minimalist process to save time and reduce the work I need to maintain the site. I consider minimalism to be a process rather than an outcome. My goal was to reduce the number of design choices that I need to make while still achieving my design goals. Unlike other minimalist websites, I wanted some visual elements beyond text and whitespace to create a visually distinct website, so I included a few photos that I took over the years for additional distinction.