The other day my dear friend John shared an article subtitled "a love letter to the personal website". I read it, and it resonated with me. Remembering as I do Geocities… and having an address in Hollywood Hills, in 1996, I remember when writing for ourselves and our friends was a thing. I miss those days. I also love to write - mostly just because - I have a lot of thoughts, a lot of the time, and writing them down is enjoyable to me, even if nobody but me, or not even I, ever read them again.

This bit was particularly relatable:

And these sites all look identical. The same style of icons, black CTAs, the same pops of the same colours. I keep landing on websites and thinking I'm looking at Vercel, and it's become this kind of bland VC-funded corporate identity that all startups have nowadays.

I used to have a blog - for a time it was moderately well-regarded, but I've long since stopped running it, and I don't think I even own the domain any more.

When I used to run my own blog, I used a lightwight CMS called Nesta, written by a friend of mine - I've just taken a look, and it seems like it's still actively developed.

But I wanted to go even more basic… I just wanted to write some text and publish it as html, and then refine it by adding a style sheet.

To be clear: I have no idea how to do this. I last did any html about 20 years ago, and I've never really understood css, so this will be a journey for me.

My plan is not to write the html myself - I will write in org mode, and export as html, but I will produce my own style sheet.

I have a tendency to over-think things, and to get bogged down by doing things perfectly, so I am going to not do that.

I bought this domain, because it was what popped into my head at the time, and I liked it.

I've provisioned an OpenBSD virtual machine, started httpd, dropped a 2 line config in, and scp'd this file to /var/www/htdocs/index.html.

server "default" {
    listen on * port 80
    root "/htdocs"
}

It probably looks rubbish, but I don't care! It's real, genuine, hand-crafted, and loved content.

Who knows if there will ever be more than this?

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