Hi, this is just to test and make sure I have everything up and running correctly, and just to further introduce my goals and ideas behind making this site, as well as a little bit about who I am and what I care about. (image of the same plant used for the background of this page, 256x256 in 16 bit)

I’m mostly making this site as a learning experience, not just to learn how to make a website but to also further my own understanding of things, I find it too easy to put things to one side and waste my time doing nothing. So I see this project as motivation for me to do more, spend less time idly scrolling and being distracted, and spend more time in a positive way, reading and researching and writing about things that interest me.

Another factor in starting this site is my hatred of the modern web and social media, the vast majority of peoples information now is an algorithmically generated slurry trained on vast amounts of personal data with its sole purpose being to retain your attention for as long as possible in order to generate ad revenue and line shareholders pockets, what you see or how you react has little to do with it as long as you keep watching, if you happen to learn anything or see anything resembling a human connection then we are sorry and next time we’ll try to have more car crash compilations intercut with Peter Griffins greatest moments.

I just think there must be better ways for us to share and connect in a digital space away from corporations and their attention extraction algorithms. I think the indie web is one of the best ways we have of doing this, along with things like RSS feeds for keeping updated, Webrings, and indie web search engines like Wiby (something I need to look more into), along with cross referencing and referring to other peoples personal websites in order to create an interconnected web of like minded people(without the need for a centralised platform) in order to foster more genuine and humane digital communities.

Technically, this site is written in HTML and CSS, no Javascript, and built using Hugo. I currently use VSCodium(a FOSS binary of microsofts VS Code) under Arch Linux to build and maintain the site and my custom theme, and I use GIMP for managing images.