First post

This post was originally written on 20 January 2019.

“Hello World” messages are a cliché, but here goes. I’ve had a web presence of some sort since 1996, but done my best not to learn much actual web design. Thus my typical web page has been hosted on a university server where I’ve had an account–real “www.university.edu/~user" sort of stuff. Since I haven’t focused on web development since before CSS became a standard, this did not push me too hard.

In recent years, this has grown insufficient. I needed a place to put data and descriptions of projects, above and beyond a GitHub account. More importantly, I find myself repeating certain points to people in my professional life, and it would be useful to write up such ideas so I can point people to them.

Practicing my writing in a semi-public forum cannot hurt either…

So, a revamped web site. As the appearance suggests, I am disinclined to expand too far beyond my roots messing with Notepad and Netscape Navigator 1.1. Though we’ve come a long way in terms of the back-end. On that note, I owe a thanks to Yihui Xie, who wrote a simple-enough Hugo theme that even I could reverse-engineer the code into something I could understand.

Update 29 June 2021: I’ve moved to Squarespace because reasons. Re-uploading an old post about moving to GoDaddy and Hugo on your shiny new web site just screams “completionist”…