Rationale

This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

— Sandia Report SANDIA92-1382 “Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant”, Trauth, Hora and Guzowski, 1993, Page F-49.

I’m tired.

I’ve published a web page on the internet since my PhD days at Cambridge, and I’ve had a lot of fun learning HTML and image map tricks and animations and all that, in order to communicate my science to interested readers. I’ve gone though some convulsions, leaning into writing HTML by hand, through markup files in DokuWiki and blogs on various platforms, through institute hosted web sites using Edward Tufte inspired styles, and most recently Jekyll served on github pages.

Throughout all of this, I’ve been mildly unsatisfied with the final results each time, hoping that slick web templates would make me feel more comfortable, but instead I was unhappy with all the preprocessing and fiddling I seemed to end up doing, all with a continuous rebuild system that seemed to take forever (well close to 30 seconds) and it just seemed… unnecessary.

I have used org-mode for managing all my projects at work and home, and I knew that it did a reasonably good job of exporting org pages to HTML with a CSS template you could work with. Inspired by the 512kb minimalist web sites, I decided to see how small I could get my web pages whilst still serving good professional content. This meant stripping out the larger images from the pages and linking indirectly, and converting markdown into org-mode syntax.

After one weekend of testing the exported pages, setting up the publishing mechanism correctly in org-mode, and reminding myself of minimal CSS styling, I have a set of pages that are very small and should work on most devices. I am sure I will still have my grumbles, but now I feel I have everything back in my control again after a two-decade-long meander.

They may not be perfect, but they’re all mine and all my work. We’ll see how long I last this time.