Happy new year!
After many years of dormancy, I have decided to revive this site for my projects and thoughts.
As the new year begins, irresistible parallels have been drawn to the dawn of the original "Roaring '20s", and I sense optimism and hope amongst many of us. My key mantra for this year is to simplify wherever possible, and this is my way to "go back" in time (note, not backwards). To that end, I thought it would be fun to figure out ways to adapt my habits to this latest iteration of the '20s.
This Site
I like the flat-file concept provided by GravCMS primarily because it feels free of bloat, and rather "old-school". I get to connect via SSH into the server and update these pages in VIM (although there is an excellent Admin module I have installed in those rare cases I need to rely on a GUI editor as I stumble through recollecting my Markdown syntax).
In my day job, I work with unfathomably large data sets across myriad concurrent database connections, millions of file I/O operations, and the like. It is cool, but I miss the elegance of simple, unconnected computing, and so have chosen a more spartan approach in my personal life.
This feels somewhat inspired by Dr Richard Stallman (RMS), guru of GNU and an originator of the Free Software movement; one time over dinner I asked him about the cadence and process with which he interacts with his emails. To the best of my recollection, I believe he has scripts that check and download emails once a day. He then takes time and care to respond, and upon the next connection cycle, the queued emails are sent out.
Whilst this seems archaic to most of us used to receiving "push" notifications for emails and "apps", I value the forced disconnection from the buzz and hum. To that end, Grav CMS seems to provide an elegant solution to simplifying my computing, at least as far as writing goes. Let's see if it can inspire more regular recording of thoughts...