lo
2023-10-30
That was the first message ever sent over ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern internet. It was sent by Bill Duvall and Charley Kline at UCLA on October 29, 1969, at 10:30 PM Pacific time; the exact time and date that this site and post have gone live 54 years later.
Welcome to what some people might consider my "blog". Truth be told, I'm not exactly confident in long-form writing (which is part of why I tend to heavily use microblogging software instead), so don't expect this to be updated very often.
That being said, I may or may not use this as more of a dumping ground for more coherent thoughts, findings, or info that I want to get out there. Would be nice to get into the habit of documenting things properly.
Regarding this site: this is the fourth iteration of essem.space. My first ever site (2017-2019) was a Jekyll/Bootstrap site that had many pages (and a basic blog), but was "overprofessionalized" to a degree and didn't really look great. I wasn't really a fan of this site, so I replaced it with a temporary set of links to other stuff (late 2019-early 2020), intending to create a proper site later. I did end up replacing this with a single page (2020-2023) that looked significantly nicer, but mainly served as a landing page with links to other stuff and didn't really have much in the way of content. (You can still view the old site here.)
After years of putting it off, I decided to put together a more complete site with an intent to gather info, notes, and whatever I felt like on it. I decided to use a static site generator this time to make managing this content slightly easier, and ended up settling on Zola for a few reasons:
- It's fast and light
- It doesn't require usage of heavier template engines like React/Vue
- It can handle markdown for blog-like sites
- It doesn't screw up the html output into an unreadable mess (long live view-source)
- It's in the default repos on EndeavourOS
Unlike the last iteration of this site, it looks very minimal and not as fancy. This is intentional; a simpler site like this does a lot in terms of accessibility and flexibility, especially in a world where every other site is 10 megabytes large, constantly changes CSS class names, and attempts to use JS for something that can be done in plain HTML.
So yeah. Welcome to the new site; it's nothing special right now, but more stuff should be added soon. Who needs a shift key anyways?
