New month, new website
Now playing: "Cadmium" by Pinegrove
Hello readers! It's been a while, hasn't it? A lot of life events have happened recently, but I finally found time to update my blog. There's been a few big changes in the works.
First of all: we're on HTTP now! I really enjoy the personal, minimal nature of the Gemini protocol [1] and its community, but it inherently limits the reach of my posts. Most of the people that I want to share my writing with don't use Gemini, and Gemini-to-HTTP proxies don't offer the best reading experience compared to a native HTML page. There are also some projects that I want to get involved with that only support HTTP websites, such as the nownownow directory [2].
To solve all of that, I plan to publish two versions of my site - one for Gemini, and one for HTTP. Both versions will offer the same content, but formatted best for each writing medium. I hope that this will offer the best of both worlds.
Another change is that my site now has some non-blog content, including a projects list [3] and a link garden [4]. This is mainly an effort for me to merge my "personal" website and my "professional" digital presence into one project. I originally had my project list on a separate professional website because I wanted to be able to speak freely about my greivances against the generative AI industry on my personal blog. However, at the time I was working at a small AI tech startup. It wasn't an ideal position for me by any means, but I still needed to ensure a good working relationship with my employer, which included not directly disparaging our line of work.
However, as time went on, I started to resent my position at that company more and more. When I was first looking for full-time work after college, I felt that I was a person that was willing to set aside my morals to make ends meet. (After all, my landlord doesn't accept moments of upstanding character as a form of rent payment.) But now, I'd rather stick to my values and do work that helps my community more directly.
All that is to say that I'm able to keep all of my work in one place now.
On the bright side, I should have a lot more time for writing now that I'm back to part-time freelance work. I have a post in the works about maintaining, repairing, and refurbishing computers, which I want to share soon. Keeping our devices alive for longer is more important now than ever before, not just because of the environmental impact of the modern consumer tech cycle, but also due to the generative AI-driven rise in consumer hardware prices. I'm planning to finish this article in the next few weeks, but no promises. :]
I'm also starting to work on a new project to make it easier to author webpages in both gemtext (used by the Gemini protocol) and HTML (used by the HTTP protocol). It isn't too difficult for me to maintain both of my websites by hand right now, but I expect that it'll become tedious in the future, especially if I end up needing to make site-wide changes later on. However, the existing Gemini-to-HTTP proxies I've seen don't fully meet my needs, since I want to be able to customize certain webpages based on the capabilities of the reader's device and web protocol. For example, I may want to include interactive content on my HTML page, or ASCII tables on my gemtext page.
My new project will hopefully make it easier for me to maintain both of my pages the way that I want, without duplicating my work too much. I'll try to post updates on this project as I go along, in case this would be useful to anyone else.
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