This is Not a Blog#

Meta

Date

2022-07-22

As of this post, this website ceases to function as a blog. What does that mean? I have been thinking about the kind of content I want to put out and I realized that I don’t like the blog format. If the reasons don’t matter to you, you can be assured that I will continue to write posts and publish my notes and thoughts, just that I won’t be attaching chronological limitations to them.

Note

I must confess that a lot of this comes from this post and I agree with what Gwern says with regards to how to organize content

I am abandoning the blog format for the following reasons.

  1. I want to continue to write using Sphinx, which, in my opinion, is the best framework for static-site generation you can find.

  2. I like the ablog plugin for sphinx, but I’ve been meaning to switch to the Furo theme and ablog doesn’t have support for it yet.

  3. I don’t like how I’ve organized my content for the past few years and I’m overhauling all of it. Some of my long-form post ideas were severely limited by the format and have been in draft-limbo forever.

  4. This way, I can update my website without worrying about whether I’m publishing new content or not. I’ve always primarily written for myself, so this should become easier.

  5. I can finally use the amazing index that sphinx creates instead of a rather useless wordcloud.

I’m happy with this change, but while this is going on, there will be a few caveats to how my older blog-posts render. I’m trying my best to restore the old style /title/ format instead of the index.html or title.html format, but it might end up being too much work. I’ll also need to figure out how to not break the RSS format. But these are things I’ll update later.

What changes?#

  1. I will update posts whenever I need to, so instead of the pages being static, the content will evolve and change.

  2. I will also start tackling some of the long-form posts that I have been meaning to write. I have been putting them off because of the format.

  3. Finding some of my older posts might be difficult for now, but I will fix this. However, the sphinx search page is amazing and you should try to use that to find it.

  4. The index is going to be the most powerful feature you can find on this website. I’m also going to see about trying to render an epub and PDF when I have more long-form articles.

  5. The biggest change you will see is that my fictional content will also start featuring on this webpage.

  6. Sometimes, by necessity, I might need to publish updates or date-specific posts, which I will do and feature on the homepage.