journal

In early december I began to look at the expenses associated with maintaining servers and other related web services and decided to economize. I decided that in place of a self-hosted WordPress installation I would bring back my static site and host it on some extra storage I had in my email system.

In parallel I had been looking at some developments with what is known as the small web / smol web, liked what I saw, and thought I would emulate the examples I saw there by simplifying my blog as much as possible.

That's where I am now. The design and constraints that it adopts, going forward, are fairly close to what are found on Gemini capsules / gemlogs, while continuing to use the html framework of the web. Gemini, with its ultra-simplified markdown system, tries to be as close to plain text as possible. Formatting, like bold and italic text does not exist; neither do ordered or nested lists. Links are placed at the end of a paragraph, rather than within the text. For some forms of writing this would probably be over-simplification, but I think this should be all right for ordinary blogging. Since composition is done in emacs org-mode (basically a sophisticated plain text system) this makes blogging very easy. In most cases it should be possible to use even less formatting code than exists within the org-mode's own syntax. My aim is to reduce friction in writing and publishing and, hopefully, reduce also the annoyances that are often found when visiting and reading contemporary websites.

Looking over my old posts, I decided that one thing I need to spend time on is cleaning up my tagging system. Many blogs, including this one, employ tags in order to find previous posts, but the usefulness of tags decreases in proportion to an increase in the number of tags. Added to which, I find I have been inconsistent in naming tags, so that there are many tags with similar names for the same subject matter. A clean up is necessary, as soon as I find time for it.