Tuesday, October 25, 2022 at 4:07 PM

Welcome to my new blog!

Hi there! It’s been a while.

I’m almost not even sure how to write these things any more, after doing it daily for like a decade or so, it seems weird starting again. But it’s time - it seems long-form writing is making a comeback after the social media apocalypse decimated intelligent thought on the interwebs. Thank goodness. Plus, I need a job - and given I’ve found my last few jobs through my blog, it only makes sense. (More about the job stuff in a later post.)

My website has been statically hosted on S3 for years now, as it wasn’t getting any updates, but now that seems static websites have become the new hotness. So a month ago I took a look at all the static blog generators out there and after playing with a few, I decided, of course, to create my own system as well as a new HTML editor called Hypertext to go with it as it didn't exist and my hatred of Markdown has no limits). Both are available on Github.

I decided to name this version of my blog, my third in like 20 years, “Notes” for several reasons. The first is a callback my original blog I started 20 years ago called the Notebook. That actually started as a Wiki I created for myself using Java of all things, hosted on a dedicated computer housed in some random server farm. Then later, I switched to a hosting company and after playing around with WordPress for a bit, re-wrote the site using PHP. Then after I decided I wasn’t going to be posting much, I saved all the generated pages as static HTML files, threw them on an S3 bucket and mostly forgot about it.

Both of those versions used pretty much raw HTML that I’d write by hand - which I didn’t mind much as that’s what I did on a daily basis anyways. When creating this blog, I was just going to grab some off-the-shelf generator and use Markdown, as that seems to be the “standard” used by everyone from random bloggers to Google, Mozilla and Apple. I have zero idea why. I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns, and though learning how everyone else is producing their docs and blogs was a good thing, I decided to try to create a revolution which I've called, unimaginatively, HTML Documents, with the extension of .htmd. More on this in another post. 

In addition to the Notebook, I also like the name Notes as that’s how I got my start back in 1994 - as a Lotus Notes developer. I still have a soft spot in my heart for that database system, so it makes me happy to use the name.

Finally, even though I haven’t been publishing my thoughts for the past decade, I’ve been writing them down anyways as personal notes or more often in long, boring comments on sites like Hacker News. I’ve got literally hundreds of pages of random ideas, brainstorms and rants that I’ve socked away in Joplin, Google Keep, as text documents, half-formed Word docs, and strewn around various hard drives and cloud storage. So “Notes” definitely seemed to be a good name. I'm going to gather a few of the better ones and post them to get the blog started. 

So… Welcome! If there’s anyone actually reading this? Well, get ready to drink from the firehose, as I've got a lot to say. 

-Russ