Initial

This isn’t a grand opening, but a tentative, tottering step. I can’t promise that I won’t give up again. To be honest, I’m terrified.

Declaring bankruptcy over an area of my life and starting over with a clean slate is such a mood. For me, what was on my own website before has lost much of its relevance due to neglect, apathy, guilt, and a side of energy-sapping depression.

It happens. The world changes around us. We adapt, but what we leave behind is a painful reminder of who we have been.

Growth

It isn’t all bad news.

I’ve come to believe that are some healthy reasons why I cringe at things I’ve said and done. I can choose to believe that I’ve grown in wisdom since that time. It may even be true, occasionally.

I never posted anything truly embarrassing. I just don’t happen to like the tone of my own voice. My reading mind is a different person than the writer.

Who this is for

Mainly, I’m doing this for myself. I still hope that somewhere out there on the Web, someone may find something helpful or interesting here. But it’s for me. I’m not trying to sell anything, and I don’t care about getting views.

I have a long history with the Web. I first learned HTML in the mid 1990s, and I’ve always had a fondness for this hodgepodge snarl of cyber connections that it fostered in us. Technology has advanced since then, obviously, though usually not for the betterment of humankind. Twenty years ago, I was in awe of tech and what seemed like boundless possibilities; today, I find tech mostly oppressive and hostile.

I’m using my website to reacquaint myself with my old fondness for the Web. Yes, some of this purpose is in service to some shameless nostalgia, but in the past few years, HTML and CSS have advanced so much. My tech career has taken me in several new directions, but I want to revisit what once made me so happy.

Building in public

I had this thought that I would build up a body of work first, while working on the site. I found myself endlessly noodling with styles and structures, rather than writing. It’s been months. Enough.

So this is me, Stephen, building in public. We’re starting with a single blog post. The styles aren’t in the best shape, and there are probably a few bugs left to work out, not just having to do with the code, but my workflow and commitment as well.

A worry stone

Ethan Marcotte wrote about his website acting as a worry stone for him, turning it over and over in his hand as he tinkered with it, and that is such an apt metaphor for how the past weeks have felt for me. I have spent this time exploring the static site framework, considering my information architecture, mapping out what kind of content I want to prioritize, and researching practicalities like hosting, caching, and performance.

I want to write about all of those things, and more.

Sustain

I don’t plan to writing too many pieces this long. As I get older, I learn more about myself - particularly my extremely narrow sliding window of personal energy that that governs my capacity to take on, well, anything.

I very much would like to keep this up. I’m trying to minimize the usual roadblocks to accomplishing that, the main one being that writing a lot burns me out. So my goal is to focus my thoughts into writing more succinctly, which should help me publish more often than I’m used to.

Thanks for listening.