Freakin Finally…
I finally have my own corner of the web. Well, it’s not really my own as much as it is also kind of everyone’s down the stack. The hosting and the domain name holder are also two companies I need to cooperate with (Thanks Parler for pointing that out for everyone!). Nor is it technically my first own corner of the web. Not only is there the regular variety of social media profiles but this isn’t the first incarnation of this site either.
The first incarnation of this site was “simple”. A WordPress powered blog with Nginx on an AWS us-east-1 EC2 Instance combined with an S3 bucket for non-blog stuff all managed at the DNS level with Route53. Simple. The WordPress part of the blog utilised some theme that stripped back a lot of superfluous details and CSS, which I then modified the PHP to strip more out of. I also added a bunch of SEO and analysis plugins, because you don’t exist if you’re not on the first page of a google search. Every time I needed to update Wordpress or make a modification off the beaten path, I had to ssh into the EC2 instance with the particular .pem cert make the changes in prod and hope nothing breaks.
It was complex.
The main site (the S3 bucket) languished. A simple “Coming Soon™” page that I handwrote occupied it the entire time.
I wrote one article for the blog. A semi-scatted piece that argued that cameras on phones act as an often invasive, ad-hoc surveillance network and that a OnePlus concept phone that hid the back cameras with electrochromic glass could act as a small but neat solution to that problem. Only a couple of months later, the brutal arrest and murder of George Floyd was caught on a cell phone camera. The article looked incredibly out of place and awkward.
Eventually, the costs started flooding in. The year of free AWS had ended, and it turned out to be much more expensive than I expected. Not only that, I hadn’t written anything for a while despite not only wanting to but also an irresponsible amount of free time thanks to a global pandemic. So to the surprise of absolutely no one, things had to change.
Like every other tech-adjacent bro, Dieter Rams is my favourite industrial designer. Not only is his work at Braun visually captivating but also physically intuitive. More so, the 10 underlying principles driving his work are easily understandable yet feel forgotten despite how often people seem to repeat them. Especially on the web, where every major website seems to be making their money finding ways to manipulate or deceive you. For as much as these sites seem to value simplicity at first glance in the user experience, once you scratch the surface the complexity becomes overwhelming. “Less but better” indeed.
During all of this, I ended up (re?)discovering the Swiss Style aka (from Wikipedia) the “International Typographic Style”. While mostly known for being the origin of Helvetica (the font so popular it has its own documentary), the Swiss Style’s focus on legibility and reducing visual pollution feels not only increasingly relevant but also as a natural partner to Rams’ familiar philosophy. The late Massimo Vignelli (who while not part of the Swiss movement, often embodied its key characteristics and turned Helvetica into the font it is today, utilising it when he redesigned the New York Subway signage into its now famous design, which the theme of this very website draws from!) wrote “the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture”. It’s hard not to feel the same looking at the web today.
So everything had to go down. It took a while. The magic of AWS isn’t that they’ve reshaped how the internet is structured or how computation itself is managed. Rather, its ability to find ways to charge you well after you think you’ve shut everything down is (it really makes you wonder how much of their revenue is made from large companies not fully dealing with stuff like this). I moved the main site back to the free domain seller DNS and pointed it to the same page hosted on GitHub Pages instead.
Building took a while. It’s no secret that there’s a ton of options for someone building a personal website but I knew I was on a quest for simplicity both in style and in substance (it also doesn’t hurt the bottom line either). Luckily for me I was also confident enough in my webdev skills to ensure I could get exactly what I wanted. Without them I doubt I’d reach a point of satisfaction. Ultimately, the stack of GitHub Pages and Jekyll would look familiar to anyone that has done something similar. While building it in R would’ve been fun and relevant to what I do (not to mention a great brag), Jekyll is more widely used, has a wider variety of themes to work with and ultimately simpler than some of the errors R could throw, especially considering my extensive experience with Rmarkdown in the past (which by the way, was almost entirely positive but has thrown some very annoying but ultimately fixable errors).
I ended up picking the swiss theme and after some modifications for visual aesthetics plus the addition of katex (unfortunately the only JS here, I was aiming for zero) and better code highlighting through rouge, I was ready to go.
And now I’m here.
PS: A note about tracking - I don’t care. I don’t have any. Even the katex code is self-hosted. The analytics of this site are not material to me.