One frequent frustration of mine is the huge complexity of software tools. Sure there are a lot of places it makes sense. Modern software packages are huge (whether or not they should be is another matter) and so need a huge build system to handle the complexity.
The problem is that this gets extrapolated to things that often don't need it. For example, a common recommendation for blogging software is wordpress. It's recommended in places that I look because its open source (at least that's what I hear about it when I go looking for open source software for setting up your own blog)
You know what else is open source blogging software? HTML
Sure, writing HTML isn't easy if you've never done any kind of text formatting before but it doesn't have to be much more complex than BASIC and people seemed to get the hang of that.
So with that rant out of the way, this site uses just HTML. At the time of writing, its almost entirely handwritten - with one relatively, small extra...
When I was writing my dissertation project, I wrote the whole thing in C and assembly then used pure make to build it. Because at the end of the day, my project wasn't massively complex. The majority of the makefile was for building and word-counting the LaTeX files that made up the actual dissertation.
A friend of mine used CMake because he thought that the effort of writing a Makefile by hand was much greater than writing CMake files. He already had experience with CMake so there was little initial cost to using it for his dissertation project, whereas I was already familiar with make so that made sense for me. However writing makefiles by hand came naturally enough to me because I was also very comfortable in the Unix command line - whence make's functionality is derived. I think make is a natural extension of Unix as a build system. Unix is very good for scripting things and that's what make is there to do.
If you were to roll-your-own build system under Unix you would probably start by making the long, flag-ridden call to the compiler into a shorthand since it rarely changes through the life of a project. Then, the build system might be extended to make it more general; you describe how to build a C file and how all those link together into the final product. But then since C files are independent of each other you could also compare the 'modified' time on the source files against the output file and only recompile the source files that have changed since the most recent build. This is getting close to what I use make for. I could probably write it myself but since make is reasonably ubiquitous already, there doesn't seem to be much need.
So I use HTML, make, and a little bit of CSS to make this site. It's all statically generated when the contents change. There's no extra work setting up hooks between services. No extra bulk of content on the HTML that I didn't write. Everything is in here because I want it to be and because I wrote it.
The Makefile I use can be found on the downloads page.
And frankly the Makefile is getting a little long in the tooth now. It has a lot of uses and I might keep it around for managing the blog but really now that I'm not including a navbar on every page it seems slightly unnecessary. I could instead just have a template.html that I duplicate for every page. The issue then comes when I want to change all the site to a new style.
Though that said, I do thoroughly enjoy finding a part of a website that hasn't updated its theming, like finding a 00's BBC News page. Maybe I leave the old themeing in as a cute little easter egg, completely removing the need for a theme-managing Makefile...
If you're reading this and I have changed the layout of the website or no longer use a makefile then hi! :D
Sat 7th Jan 2023 @ 2:00am :/
i can't remember where my name came from. but i remember thinking about it for a while before it left my head for the first time in a diary entry in january 2024. since then i used it lots within my journal until i finally started using it with other people around august 2024. i've been thinking about middle names a lot recently. rebecca is nice but i keep hearing more names that i want. luna really sticks out to me, i saw it on a board game in the board game shop i go to and i just think it sounds super cute. i also really like the name astrid. i used it for my d&d character at my partners suggestion for a swedish girls name for my dwarf druid (who i do a swedish accent for) and honestly really like it.
a while ago i found this video [youtube] that talks about names in a way i really like. while reading about deed polls i found out that england doesnt have the concept of a 'legal name'. that is, i dont actually have an assigned name, beyond whats written on my birth certificate, passport and drivers licence. that same name is used for bank accounts and everything else. a deed poll merely shows that i have an intention to use a different name consistently.
it may seem obvious but all this made me realise that names are a lot more flexible than i thought. i can have packages addressed to other names than the one on my birth certificate even without a deed poll. and i regularly register for important things (flights or online payments) with a truncated version of my full legal name.
it might be nice to think of names like i think of identities: like pin badges i can pin to my clothes and wear them with different outfits. i can swap them out as and when i like and they dont have to be official.
~ becca astrid luna
wed 17th sep 2024 @ 16:00