Functional website

The first step to accountability

This is the first non-testing post on this website. I meant to have it done yesterday so I could cleanly start at the beginning of a month, but I guess shit happens. Either way, I’m proud that the site now looks and feels great; there is much more functionality and more pleasing design than other static sites I have made in the past. Yes, this is made with Astro, which was a great help, and on top of that, reliant on a template called Astrogon, which was well-built, open-source, and well documented. This is not to diminish that I got it working and customized because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Why write a blog that no one is ever going to read?

I’ve been asking myself this question. Is it really worth paying for a website when I could just do it locally for free when the result is the same? Hell, I can run this astro site on localhost and save myself the yearly registration fee. I’m never going to tell anyone about this, and no one is ever going to find it. Well, I don’t know. I don’t really have a good reason. Archival reasons are the first thing that comes to mind, but again, that can be achieved if I were to run it locally. Maybe a robot will find it interesting someday, probably long after I have been killed for abusing ChatGPT. Although I used ChatGPT to help me through Astro, and it was one of the first times I’ve found it useful in a long time. Thanks, robot. Or perhaps thank you to all the people that unknowingly donated their training data. I don’t know what an LLM is or how it works.

For the sake of honesty, maybe I’m hoping someone someday will find it and - I don’t know - want a useless friend. I got this idea after seeing a youtube stream titled “Day 168 of teaching myself code.” I didn’t watch it, but perhaps there is just something human about wanting to share your journey, even if it is just to a void.

The registration fee is $10/year. It’s not like that matters, even to someone who is unemployed. I need to stop worrying about money so much, but I guess it has just been hardcoded into me.

What’s the plan here?

I don’t know; I’ve already said everything that needs to be said. Should I continue to yap? Should I just stop here? No one is going to read this - I know that.

I feel good

It’s been so long since I’ve done anything productive, this feels like a reletively large achievement. Astro is cool. These posts are written in markdown, so that’s what I’ll be using from here on out. That’s basically plaintext, if you’re wondering. So the knowledge of Astro will probably fade, since I’m not dealing with its code anymore nor will make any other websites. I don’t know, maybe I’ll go back and redo my other static sites. But again, what is the point without visitors? Does creation for creation’s sake mean anything? Yes, it does. Look, mom, I’m a philosopher!

Here’s some LaTeX because I can.

Shannon’s index of diversity: $H = -\sum p_i * \ln (p_i)$