Over the past few months, or in fact really the past half year, I have been working on a rework of my blog. Though this started out as yet another visual redesign, I let it escalate into a complete revamp of the way I intend to publish content. Fundamental to both the backend and the frontend were a few goals of mine. First off I want this platform to reflect the multiple facets there are to my life. There is not simply an all consuming topic which I dive into, and with which I’d like to exclusively define myself. This is a subtlety I want to be able to communicate, and normalize.
This subtlety leads me to the second point, and that is that I absolute despise social media. Most social platforms do not facilitate subtlety, and would much rather promote controversial and simplistic takes. I get it, it’s good for the money, but it exhausts me. As a way to deal with that I’m looking to give my blog a more prominent role in my online presence. The primary way to do that is to integrate these social media platforms more closely with my blog. Content I publish here will be automatically propagated to the different platforms I’m on, starting with email and Twitter, which might be extended to the more obscure ones I’m on later.
One thing I completely changed is the tags system. Those are some sort of free-form yet somewhat hierarchical web of tags. Posts may have several of these, and depending on your area of interest I’d highly recommend clicking through those which you find interesting. Related to that I try to group related posts together such that there’s some additional reading content. Sometimes those internal links are prior work, somewhat related work, or a continuation of an earlier thought. Feel free to explore these.
I don’t really feel like diving into the technical details about the stuff powering my blog now, though with enough interest I might cover that in a later post. As of now it is not really an easily reproducible set-up, which might be interesting to resolve in the future. There’s a few libraries here and there I might write to solve smaller problems in a more generic way first. One such thing I’m looking into is to create a plugin for Strapi which should handle social propagation of the content published in the CMS. If someone would be interesting in that, hit me up!
As for now there’s been more important things I want to write about rather than the changes I have made to my blog, and that’s what I’ll get back to now, and which I will publish on here shortly thereafter.