This Website

Meta article alert! I wrote about some of my other “end-to-end” projects on this site, but this website has been a project itself. As I continue to mess with it, I may keep updating this page. Anyway, a summary:

the beginning

I actually had a website at this same domain when I was in undergrad. I discovered blogdown and Github pages, and, since I was a heavy R user at the time, I was off to the races. The main goal I had was to demonstrate to future employers that I was a competent person, both statistically and just as a general technology user.

Looking back, the Github pages site (the generic-domain version of which is being kept up for posterity’s sake) taught me more about Git than anything else. Also, I’m fairly certain that nobody really looked at it (their loss). The other interesting effect that it had on me was that I became more fond of very simplistic/minimalist websites. First, they load a ton faster. Second, there is something satisfying to finding content that someone actually invested time into. Think about all of the times that you Google search something and get nonsense, AI-generated, SEO-bloated articles on websites with horrendous JavaScript. Not so with most of the minimalist sites I’ve interacted with! Third, simple sites are just easier to manage. :)

I consider this site just “v2.0” of that Github pages site. After my brief foray into working in college athletics and wrapping up my graduate degree, I realized that there was so much more I was interested in tinkering with technology-wise. It’s pretty ironic that I settled on the current website construction (Markdown templates + Hugo) since this really the exact same thing that the old Github pages site was doing those years ago (R Markdown + blogdown (which uses Hugo)). But perhaps the evolution is appropriate since I am dealing more with the internals and actual templating now than I was before.

Other things this website has taught me: some nginx basics, how to set up an email server(s). As someone who “grew up with the Internet”, I was always amazed by the wealth of information that was out there. Now that I am ““contributing”” (barely) to that wealth of information, it’s a) pretty cool and b) much more simple than young-Internet-user younger me thought. I’m already looking forward to the other services that I can get running on my tiny VPS. Self-hosting in the future is something that I am interested in, as well. The email thing was very cool; I’m a big fan of owning my own data (as you can imagine, I think a lot about data :)), and being able to have more control over online communication is something that is really appealing to me. While setting up an email server isn’t that hard (as I came to learn), I found it quite fulfilling (and it also made me think about the infrastructure that must be in place for some of the larger email providers).

Potential things for the future: As of mid-2023, I am completely off of social media. I never was a big social media poster, anyway (I think I can count the number of Instagram anc Twitter posts I’ve ever made (manually) with two hands). Bots don’t count for that figure, right? With the whole Twitter / X / whatever-it-is-called-when-you-are-reading-this debacle, I’ve become more interested in the fediverse, since that seems like an approach to social media that is more in line with the old “wild west” approach to the Internet that I grew up with. So, I’m thinking of branching out into something like that, hosting some of these federated services so me and some friends can partake in what seems like a very interesting part of the Internet to be in right now.

an update – June 2024

I wanted to spruce up the website and found a cool Hugo theme called Paige that was extensible and offered a lot of customization options. That is the current theme of the site! Re-theming required some good documentation reading and an improved understanding of CSS but I am glad that I undertook the project!