About (2020–2024)
History
When I started this capsule in late 2020, I thought to myself “How can I make it so the work of writing for the internet is as pleasant as possible? How can I keep the friction of writing as low as possible?”
I settled on having no build step for the site itself, like I would with Hugo (a popular and very good static-site generator). I would just write, and then reupload everything when I wanted to publish or update something.
Of course, if there’s no build step, then I’d have to do things that build steps do or duck the need somehow:
- have a manually-written page that links to subpages, and has the subpages’ titles duplicated
- settle for automatically-generated directory listings for the above
- just write everything on one big page
The words/ directory hierarchy in this capsule uses the top two options (mostly the bottom/middle), whereas Scrawlspace goes for the latter option (helped along by a doubly-linked list between each year’s page).
I dislike writing raw JSON, so I introduced a build step to turn YAML into JSON. This got me the JSON Feed that this site offers. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a small Python program to turn the JSON feed into an Atom feed, which is actually supported by most Gemini-aware feed consumers.
In August of 2024 this capsule got rsync support, which saves loads of time not uploading things that have already been uploaded. While this isn’t a huge issue for an all-text site, uploading tens or hundreds of megabytes of images indiscriminately would start to grate.
After nearly four years of mostly just speaking calmly into the void, I’m sometimes surprised I still post. And yet, I do, and I like doing so. It scratches an itch I didn’t know I had.
Text
This capsule has been edited with a number of text editors, roughly sorted by how much they’ve been used to edit the capsule:
Images
This site happily uses WebP, one of the finest semi-popular lossless image-compression codecs available today. By using WebP instead of PNG, this site shaves a whole 34 bytes (halving the file size!) off of the tracking pixel used on all pages here.
Speaking of the tracking pixel, its cheery, transparent self-introduction is derived from the finest e-mail .signature viruses from the late 90s.
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Source