The setting
Roughly a week ago Reddit locked their old design behind a login screen.1 This was a long time coming, and plenty of texts have been written on why the redesign sucks, I don't have anything interesting to add to that.
Admittedly I haven't been using Reddit for much. Most of my engagement has been commenting on r/haskell every few months, hoping to figure out how to correctly structure software through discussion, and more often than not being met with silence. In a way I've been blogging this whole time, just piecemeal and rarely at the top of the page.
Since we're in the era of the Internet where all of the largest social media websites are login-only, I don't trust Reddit to remain open forever. I'll try to minimize my exposure to it (thankfully the abysmal load times on mobile make it easy), and syndicate to Haskell's Discourse first.
The content
Up until a few years ago I would say I have nothing to blog about. I've always been god-awful at writing essays and most of my opinions are, frankly, uninteresting. It takes me an hour to write a comment and writing this blog post is taking me a full day.
Then I disassembled the data file for original Risk of Rain game, made in GameMaker.2 The internals feature some terrible programming (as is the norm for videogames), and I would argue are wholly worthy of a blogpost. I never got around to making one, because, well, I'd need to make a blog for it.3
Now that I have a reason to put all of my refined Haskell opinions in one place, the need for a blog is no more in question. From the few blogs I've seen, making one post every three years is completely normal, so I'll fit right in.
The form
I want the blog to be dirt simple—just like the ideas I wish to communicate within it—and that means no JavaScript and no generation from other formats. Though, if web browsers could render Markdown I'd probably stick with that.
Having scrolled past a bunch of "you can do this in CSS now" posts over the years, and having little to no frontend experience, I was fully ready to have thirty years of UI innovation piped right into my cranium. It took me three painful days to learn that I can't align sidenotes with arbitrary paragraphs in the main section because flexboxes don't flex that way. I'm thoroughly disappointed, but at least I learned something.
The result is a webpage that looks timeless as if I had
cobbled it together two decades ago. The only semi-modern feature is
automatic dark mode.
Oh well, at least it looks great in Lynx.
The place
Hosted on Github Pages, owned by Microsoft.