I’ve been trying to get to the point of writing a blog for a long time. Maybe a few years. Key roadblock: a website is not like a normal piece of writing. Even if you’re following a nonlinear narrative, or are working on some baroque thesis with a lot of sources in some horrific Serpent’s Hand-type refs.bib, or have to write a report on an experiment you did in second year whose theory section involves knowledge of fourth year-level QFT you couldn’t possibly as yet understand, there is pretty much always a defined way to begin: just begin. Just fill the first page.

I would wager that a blog is not something for which ‘just begin’ is a massively intuitive starting point. It’s the Web. There is no first page. This post, incidentally, is the first thing I chose to write, but I could just as well have decided to start with an index page, or other structs like, I don’t know, links to my github, a music page, whatever. And I also chose to write before I chose to package - that is to say, at the time of writing this, I haven’t picked or created a theme for hugo yet. Or a domain name. Or figured out how to push to the VPS. The actual site proper does not yet exist.

Which was the other key road block: actually learning how the Web works. A novelist doesn’t really particularly have to know how to edit a novel or create its cover, members of a band don’t necessarily have to know how to produce and market an album (although, to be honest, I think it’s something worth trying to learn), and no scientist is running their own academic journal. But a website is basically the de facto DIY thing, at least to me. It seems intuitive that you should try to make your own website if you’re going to have one at all. This is maybe for no other reason than that it’s cheap (even free, if you’re not looking to have your own domain name and can skimp a bit on resources or total control over what framework or workflow you use, or whatever).

Probably also because the Web was pitched to us, when it first came out, as a perfect anarchist information distribution system that any one of its users could spew raw creativity out onto with minimal resources and with final authority. Of course, our friends at Google, Facebook, et. al. have crushed this dream like a cruel child might a butterfly with the wheel of his Heely. Just smeared it into the pavement. They took advantage of the very real desire people have to be creative with this obviously good-in-principle system and gave us social media. Why exactly this is a terrible substitute for a website is either clear or the subject of another post. I could mull on that for a while. The point is that I personally feel a strong desire to make my own website. It could be true that part of this is just a precocious Irish-dad DIY attitude, but I’d like to at least hang some reason off this attitude rather than profer it as a final explanation.

And so here it is.