A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I used to have a personal home page hosted somewhere. That was one of many other side projects of my life. I discovered some years ago that having multiple failed side projects along the way is a common experience for geeks and for many non-geek people, too. For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, some months ago, I decided that restarting a personal website in 2024 could be a not so weird idea.
One of the motivations is probably connected to the general idea that abandoning corporate social networks and regaining possession of our digital identities is nowadays the way to go. The indieweb is a return to the original idea of the World Wide Web and a duty of all of us geeks of the early days of the Internet.
For the same reason, the only social network I'm now actively using is Mastodon.
That said, blogging could be a challenging activity for me, I rarely think my casual thoughts are deep and interesting enough to be good for a public exposure. I generally prefer to focalize on activities that require more time and efforts than a few minutes to write down a draft note. But anyway, let me start and see how it will go in the next months.
In the next few sections I'll dial with how I created this system and what are my goals for the next short future.
Jamstack
First of all, I decided almost immediately to run a jamstack system for generating static pages starting from simple text documents. Such kind of system is more than enough for my purpose and even for a lot of web sites out there that instead use Wordpress or other exotic content management systems with a DBMS.
Lisp and Scheme
Once decided for a jamstack the possible choices are embarrassingly numerous, but as a few people could know, I always prefer by age and inclination unconventional niche solutions for my personal stuff. So, why not taking in consideration a family of languages that last year I decided to go in detail and never touched before? That would be the perfect occasion to motivate myself into such study.
Guile and Haunt
Fortunately, the possibile choices for a jamstack application is much more restricted, and I soon focalized on the GNU Guile dialect of Scheme and the Haunt blogging application by David Thompson. In just a couple of hours I managed to bootstrap all required modules and scripts to create a working system. Great!
So what?
The following posts and work will probably be concentrated on refinements of the styling and code, but at least I finalized an initial version of this new blog to write about... what? Well, I'm a techie and researcher in Earth Observation and remote sensing of the environment, with a special interest in geospatial technologies at large, so some topics will be obvious. For all the rest, who knows? Have a look to my haunt from time to time, it could be interesting...