Death and Rebirth
The Intention
Of late, I have been thinking about life and death and life beyond death.
I now believe that creating everlasting art is the only way to achieve true immortality. Art (and progeny, to a certain extent) is the only way to live beyond the grave.
And since I am not yet anywhere close to creating the kind of art that would qualify even for consideration in the “everlasting” category, I decided to be more intentional about whatever I do create.
Which brings me to this blog, why I decided to nuke the earlier site and instead rebuild it with some new principles in mind.
The Principles
The principles I tried to follow (as much as possible) are:
Make My Work Here Last Beyond My Death
My earlier site was a Wordpress-based site hosted on a HostGator shared hosting account.
This setup came with three problems:
- It would not work beyond my death, since the credit card that I use to pay my hosting fees would most probably have been cancelled by then.
- I grew tired of the shitty service that the HostGators and the BlueHosts of the world provide. After countless attempts with the CS agents of both of the afore-mentioned failed to provide me a successful way to transfer my WP content from one to the other, I gave up and swore off them.
- I did not want to pay to have this content hosted for the rest of eternity.
Retain full control over the presentation
I could have chosen to use the free hosting on Wordpress.com, Medium, etc., but they did not give me as much freedom of information organization as I wanted.
And while I do want an audience for some of what I will write, I also want to retain control over which articles are exposed to which audiences. E.g. I will be publishing professional articles here and then distributing to Linkedin, but not the personal or rant-y ones.
Avoid advertising-based business models.
While I do not believe advertising itself is evil, I do believe that at some point the interests of most advertising-based companies will diverge from the best interests of their customers.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
- Upton Sinclair
And since I do not have a way to clearly predict or dilineate between the different companies which would or would not in the future put their own interests above their users, I decided to steer clear of all of them and instead put my faith in a company that makes their money by providing a valuable and paid service to their customers - Github.
The Stack
That is the story of why (and how) this site came to be on the current stack of:
- Static Site Generation by Hugo
- Hosting on Github pages
- Images on Flickr (Github allows upto 1GB for the Pages repos, and I’d very soon cross that limit if I included the images)
The Plan
Over the next few months, I will be building out more sections of this site.
- I plan to blog a lot more, about my side projects, learning paths and other trains of thoughts. I will be using this site as a notebook to work through the articulation of my ideas and arguments.
- For each of my side projects:
- I will publish my project plans before I start working, in an effort to hold my own future self accountable. I have no doubt I will fail to meet many of my own project milestones - and that I will use as feedback for my next planning.
- I will also publish my demos and WIPs. I will seek feedback early and often.
- For the lessons that I am undertaking, I will also be publishing the plans before hand. For the same reasons as above.
I welcome you and fellow travellers to join me on this journey.
May we be interesting in, and after, life.