It’s a good question.
There’s a lot stuff that I’d like to make videos about—and I probably will. While that waits, however, why not share some of those thoughts preliminarily?
While I do have a Substack, I also want to have “my own” website, where I’m in charge of the structure and feel. (weeeeell, in this case I’m using the Chirpy Jekyll theme, but I have messed around a lot with the functionality and styling)
So this is that site: My main site with all my Substack publications linking back to it. But it has more than just “newsletter”-type stuff.
What’ll be on here?
Once, the internet would be full of sites like this. (It honestly still is—it just isn’t that popular anymore.) Usually about something random that the author was interested in. These days, I only find sites like that with developers and other online tech-people. This very theme was supposed to be for “technical writing,” whatever that means. (Documentation, probably)
I just want to have that little corner of the internet to myself. To ramble on about the things that I like. This site will have kindof a diverse content field, with thoughts, documentation, and random research that I come across. Some of it’ll even be about the videos that I make. It’ll vary in quality but hey, that’s just part of the process. This theme even comes preloaded with an RSS feed, if… that’s your vibe.
In this day of companies pushing shortform content, it’s nice to see that longform content is making a comeback, with stuff like Substack, Medium, and longform in general becoming more and more popular. Stuff like podcasts as well are increasing in listenership as well. There’s actually a really good video that I found on this topic. (hey, future article idea!) So jumping into it seemed like a good idea.
I also just really like typing and having somewhere to publish that is pretty cool.
Also, if you have no idea what this is or who I am, the about me exists! how professional. (how did you even get here??)
Newsletter vs. Blog
Deciding to make a blog/newsletter wasn’t a difficult decision, but rather a confusing one. I’m not sure what exactly a newsletter would be useful for in my context—I don’t even read that many, so why in the world would I write one?
Turns out, the definition of newsletter has kinda slipped into the “blog” category. So, it’s not like I’m going to be sharing bulletins about… anything. Rather, it’ll just be my own reflections and thoughts about various topics.
Recently I’ve had a bit of a dilemma. should I go with Chirpy or Minimal Mistakes as a Jekyll theme? The thing is, I already spent a long time researching and watching tutorials on Chirpy and I didn’t know if I could edit it to do the things that I wanted it to. It was partially my mistake, and partially the fact that—no offense Chirpy creators—the Chirpy documentation consists of like five pages, whereas the other competitor for my website’s theme was Minimal Mistakes, which has… a lot more than five pages of documentation (maybe a little bit too much.)
While I was making this site, I had a bit of a dilemma: should I go with Chirpy or Minimal Mistakes as a Jekyll theme? If you’re versed in Jekyll lore (not the novel), you’ll see that I have arrived at using Chirpy. No disrespect to Minimal Mistakes; in fact, I spent a day tweaking it and things to make it look like Chirpy, just because I loved how many features that Minimal Mistakes had. Turns out, I didn’t need most of them.
When I realized that I had inadvertently learned Jekyll, and alongside with it, Liquid, I decided to see for myself if I could add the features that I like to Chirpy. It worked! I threw away (metaphorically) the other site that I had been making with Minimal Mistakes. Guess that was one of them.
Now I can once again, as I do, mutate another software past its original concept to my own monstrosity.