First!

Feb 8

Since I make my living (and spend pretty much all my time playing with) the web, it sure seems like I should have a personal site. I've been putting off creating one for a couple years now, and I'm really happy to have fixed this.

It took me a long time partly because I didn't want to just install Wordpress and be done. Most of the personal sites that I really enjoy -- like Tim Bray's, Peter Norvig's, and jwz.org are at least somewhat idiosyncratic. That appeals to me. I want a good foundation for experimenting at least as much as I want to write, and I think any off the shelf software would stifle that.

So, here we go. This page you're reading right now is being served to you by a custom blogging tool, written in Ruby. It uses the excellent Mongrel to serve itself, but other than that it's almost completely custom and library-free. I guess this means I'm writing a web framework (these days, everybody's got one). So far it's pretty simple, but it already does a couple neat things that are making me happy. All data lives in memory, and automatically persists itself to disk whenever it changes, and pages are described with a simple programmatic HTML (similar to Seaside's) that lets you build a library of compound tags as you go.

Here's hoping I manage to keep at this, and am still updating this thing in 2018.

Phillip Kast

First!

Feb 8

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