shitposting

I am not posting as much on here as I was on Cohost. One reason is that I have just been really busy and tired recently.

Another is simply I spent a lot of time on Cohost. I have praised it a lot and how it felt more deliberate and less of a trap than other social media sites, but it was still a place I could open to kill time and scroll be driven by the small joys of getting notifications. I felt I got more out of it than other places where I did that, and it fostered that addiction at bit less, but it still did it.

But also there’s a psychological barrier. I still have this feeling that this site is something serious and I have to write in clear semi-formal prose and have something to say. Just posting “I won’t tell anyone if I win the lottery but there will be sins” feels wrong. Which is silly. This is my website. I can write anything I want on here. And I enjoy shitposting. I should be doing it. Maybe If I can get into the flow of treating this place more casually I can feel a bit more open again. Perhaps if I can get over the embarrassment of it I might even post some kink stuff.

But there is another reason too: Posting on here is much more deliberate. I use Jekyll as a static-site generator so making a post involves creating a new text file on my PC and running a small command line script to build and push the changes to my server. It’s not a huge effort, but it’s certainly more than using a website. I like building this site.

Sylvia (quoting someone else) said that “a personal website is like a model train set, in that it’s never really done and you work on it constantly in the hopes that someone will see it” and I think that’s a great comparison! I have a todo list for ideas for this site as long as my arm and as a programmer by trade I both enjoy and know how to make extra work for myself doing it. It was originally just a site built with the default Jekyll minima theme but I have bolted on a lot of extra features and generators. There’s a pipeline to build Pico-8 games from source and an entire podcast processing system and these all run every time I regenerate the site. The overhead with these wasn’t too bad at first but over time it has just taken longer and longer to build and push the site for small changes.

But this is just another problem to solve! I enjoy doing this. I already do have a janky system in place for testing the site while skipping some of the more intensive steps for testing, but I can’t use it to push changes to the site because it would fuck up certain pages which would get replaced with versions that are missing things.

I have some idea already of how I want to go about this and it involves dividing up the site a bit more cleanly into discrete parts. This is going to result in moving some stuff around and in particular I think I will be moving everything in the gallery to a new URL scheme so any current links to my exhibits are going to break. Sustaining a few 404s is fine and if I do find anyone linking to specific pages I might set up some manual redirects but I don’t want to have to set up a million redirect rules. I have too many already and I think I’m going to be removing most of them other than for the Atom feeds to reduce clutter as well.

And then, maybe shitposting?