Hello! I have started a blog. If you're reading this, it is proof that I finally did it! For several months I have contemplated getting long-form thoughts out into the world, even if just for the catharsis and personal edification.

Programmer Preamble

Unfortunately, as a web developer, I'm mentally unable to pick the simplest off-the-shelf product, and instead trudged into the world of dark-mode IDEs, package dependencies, and scouring StackOverflow while scratching ones' head. This won't be a labour of love. It won't be esoteric, bleeding-edge, feature-laden, or even pretty; it will be as simple as it needs to be to serve its purpose, and most importantly it will exist in some form, now, rather than exist only in an ill-fated pipeline of half-ideas and unrealised aspirations. Getting this up and running is a victory, no matter its form.

So, let's embrace the minimalism. The first version won't have any CSS. I'm using libraries that I'm familiar with. If there's an error, it won't be handled. All of that can come later, if I want to invest my energy further. It wouldn't be my first repository to abruptly stop receiving commits.

Why Blog?

This is an exploration of writing about myself, my opinions, and my experiences. It will be both factual and riddled with personal biases - unashamedly and by design. I never got sucked into Twitter, and my interactions with Instagram are surface-level. I didn't blog in the mid-2000's as a teen, and I don't aspire to publish any of my self-created Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings. So basically, having my opinions online is novel to me.

The goal is to say something, while saying it well is secondary. I'm not interested in being a voice for any community, and the idea of popularity makes me recoil. This is more of a diary than anything, but one that I can easily point friends, family, and acquaintances to when relevant.

Subject Matter

It will help to have a focus, otherwise this will truly be a blog full of ramblings.

I did a lot of travelling in 2022. I stayed within my native United Kingdom, but saw an order of magnitude more of it than before, and I enjoyed it more than most of my trips abroad. They were the highlight of my year, and a much-needed escape from life's worries. It rekindled my childhood love of landscape photography.

The goal is to share my travel adventures in several forms:

While I would like to blog about more topics, that feels like a good place to start - especially as wanting a home for the above was the prime motivator for me to open VS Code in my spare time. Having a blog ready to go will allow me to pivot into any topic or hot take I wish as the future sees necessary.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

As a serial project abandoner, it is critical that this blog is as easy as possible to update. If I have to spend hours writing a blog post, I won't. If I don't write posts, I'll forget this existed and it'll become a statistic. While I'd like to commit to a schedule and hold myself accountable to some of my personal goals in 2023, just having a straightforward process will be enough.

To that end, I've opted to write my blog in Markdown. It is lightweight, can be written in any text editor, and requires minimal markup to convey basic written structure. I wrote all of my D&D notes in Markdown for the same reason, and never once regretted it. Stick with what you know works!

While it requires front-loaded effort to set up, I have set up a directory where each Markdown file is its own blog post, so adding a new one is easy. The goal is to have the same setup with images so that I can embed photos into blog posts simply by referencing the file name. An image gallery will be a bit more involved if I want metadata and an attached write-up, but that will be worth the effort too.

Onwards...

Here's hoping this is the first of many blog posts!