this webbed site

It's a bit gauche to write about how a static site is put together; I've seen countless "personal blogs" filled with a single tidy and dated entry about how a website was put together. I'm not particularly interested in being one of them, so this isn't a blog and this hopefully won't be the only thing on it.

Documents on this site can be HTML, Markdown, or Org (via pandoc), are templated using m4, then put into place using (g/b)make. Nice and simple, and importantly for me, available everywhere. Maintaining somebody else's Jekyll site made it very clear to me that I'm only interested in using something that works every time, and works everywhere. I push it over SSH to a small VPS running OpenBSD to serve it to the public internet, which naturally runs httpd, relayd, and acme-client. I also make a point of making this site quite small; long, bloated page loads on poor connections are frustrating.

Beyond the frankly boring - on purpose, I suppose - technical aspects of this site, I find myself in a strange position. It's a personal website tied to my real identity, which comes with an implied need to present myself in a particular way. While I don't have any real desire to bare my true heart on the public internet - at least not under my own name - I also resent the ways in which people are expected to round off all of their sharp edges to present the veneer of a work-thing, absent of anything that makes them a person. I'd like to strike a balance here; of something palatable enough that doesn't feel like a denial of myself.