Meta

motivation

I think having your own home page is an invaluable opportunity to collect thoughts and ideas, while having a (theoretically) unrestricted and independent creative outlet. Think of it as my little contribution to keep the web open, accessible and decentralized.

This site is also a mess, which is a direct consequence of me throwing everything I like into a giant sludge and then re-cooking it on a low heat. For instance, I've taken the wiki-ish aspect from Justin's Links, organize my writing the way it's been done by jwz and Dave Winer, and try to have the site vibe like kolor, and so on. That being said, I try to do this in a way that still feels authentic to me. (Friends have told me it does! Cool!)

a technical perspective

I still enjoy writing most of the HTML by hand and I am quite efficient at doing so, although I resort to a couple of scripts for generating more complex pages.

I do not use a CMS, because

• I could not find a single one to satisfy my needs.
• Most of them are in PHP anyway which is a disqualifier.
• I don't want to spend months configuring them and keeping them up to date.

Being responsible for virtually all of the HTML at this place also means that I can insert an easter egg every now and then. Feel free to write me an e-mail if you find one of these.

editing

I create most pages in GNU Emacs, using web-mode.el amongst other packages for editing HTML and Template::Toolkit markup. Look here for my config.

scripting

Resources such as the pulp feed and other minor pieces are generated using Perl.

Excellent modules of choice include:

• Mouse
• Template::Toolkit
• HTML::Packer
• Time::Moment
• Mojo::File
• Mojo::DOM
• GD::SecurityImage

tooling

I use a simple Makefile to handle various tasks such as building feeds (perl), rendering photo galleries (perl + GraphicsMagick), rendering stylesheets (perl + sassc), uploading the whole site (rsync) or serving it for development purposes (thttpd, a small, fast and unobtrusive file + cgi server).

hosting

Netcup is hosting this site, and they have been good to me so far. Other people might beg to differ.