I'm starting a blog

March 07, 2024

Hello, I’m Curvise (they/them). I’m starting a new blog.

Although I’ve already written an /about page, this seems a good time to offer an introduction. I work as a software engineer, I wish I lived underwater, and I aspire to be an AI. I am a fairly private person so making this site is kind of strange for me.

I originally only really wanted to build a personal site for my spider photos, but I think it’s worth adding some more content here. A little backstory: during 2020 my spider photography was ramping up as I stayed home and tended my patio garden. I found out about spiderid.org, which at first I loved but cannot endorse in good faith. A place for me to upload my photos and to get help identifying them seemed great! Until I realized the site had died before I ever arrived, as moderation had ceased and only moderators could mark photos as identified. There were still users commenting helpfully, so it took me a while to realize the state of things. But the primary feature of the site, a catalogue of identified, dated photos of spiders, was not functioning.

And then I started seeing ads. So that site was truly dead to me.

However, I needed my photos in some sort of catalogue. I figured I could just make one, since it was only for me and wouldn’t be massive. It is manually built from yaml files and some custom Liquid code and could really use a CMS of its own, but it’s not too bad since I’m not doing very much writing for it.

However, now I want to do some actual writing. I want to write for its own sake, not in support of my photos, and for that I will need some sort of editor.

Doing some writing

I’m writing this blog post on stackedit.io after trying to set up two different CMSes locally. Both Ghost and TinaCMS failed opaquely in setup, and searching found other people had encountered the same issues, years ago, and never gotten answers.

Good hacker that I am, I gave up immediately. Could I get one of them to work? I’m sure of it. Could I do that and still have time to write a blog post tonight? Almost certainly not.

And here I am, writing. This is my first blog – ever. I’m in my 30s but I’ve never had or wanted much of an online presence. But for some reason, it’s started to feel quite interesting recently.

Anyway, yes, I could just write in html or markdown files directly in my Jekyll project. But I wanted at least a little bit of creature comfort; if there was too much friction I wouldn’t keep doing it. I tried raw-dogging it before and really didn’t enjoy it – plus it left too much room for errors. (You may find some of those in the catalogue, where I’m not writing with a spellchecker.)

Next up

I’ll have to figure out some sort of tagging system, I think. For now, I’m glad to be able to write in a decent WYSIWYG editor and get some thoughts down on paper magic rocks. I’ve only ever used pretty basic functions of Jekyll so I’ll look into what kinds of features I can make use of there later.

I plan to write one post a week. I’ve got several ideas but none are very fleshed out and I don’t have much experience doing this in blog form, if that isn’t obvious, so I think it’s best I pace myself.

And, that’s about it for tonight. It’s been a long day.

tags: site-update