About this site

What is this site?

It’s a personal blog. Currently I’m using it to write about books I’ve read, though I’m open to writing about other topics in the future!

Why not a Substack?

My original idea was to create a Substack. However, when I thought about it more, I realised: why do you need to use yet another platform to do this? What is Substack bringing to the table here?

It seemed to me that the benefit of using Substack here would be discovery. Substack has a feed, similar to a Twitter feed or timeline, where you can see and discover the posts of other creators. But I feel unconvinced that’s a good enough reason to surrender ownership of whatever I write.

Perhaps it is just a nostalgic fantasy but I miss the days of surfing the net, when you would go online and actually discover different websites. The internet has become very consolidated. I really hate that the internet now, in effect, is like 5 different websites. I firmly believe that we should own our online identities.

Using my own website gives me:

  • Complete ownership over how the website appears - I can make this site look however I want, and it’s fun to design the style of the website and how it appears
  • Complete ownership over which technology I choose to make it in - I talk more about this below, but I like tinkering with technology and playing with different tools
  • Complete ownership over the content I write - if I want to move my content from my site to somewhere else, I’m free to, safe in the knowledge that it cannot be deleted, modified, tampered with or censored.

How did you make it?

I decided to use Hugo to generate the site. It takes simple, Markdown formatted files as an input, and produces the web pages that you are seeing now. Markdown is nice to work in because the formatting is all done in text, so you never have to move away from the keyboard to write an article! It’s an open format that is supported by many tools, open-source and proprietary, so I’m not tied to using a specific tool to write it.

GitHub is used for source control, although the repository itself is private. Cloudflare’s free tier is being used to serve these pages to you. It integrates very easily with Hugo: a GitHub action is used to automatically deploy the latest changes in git to the website - you can find information about this here.

Because of how small the markdown files are, and how quick Hugo is to generate them, changes to the site can be live in about 20 seconds. Pretty good!

Licensing

The styling is based on the Bear Blog theme for Hugo, which is published freely under an MIT license. That said, I have changed it pretty dramatically. The fonts used are self-hosted, and are reproduced here under the terms of the SIL Open Font licence.

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