mxv

Earlier this year I decided to full re-write this website using hand-written html and css, using the Zola static site generator. I've been hand-writing html, and later css, for exactly thirty years now, so I've no problem with that, but using a static site generator was new to me – I'd tried a few out over recent years, but while I like Zola much more than many of the others I tried, it always seemed like a massive faff compared to writing everything by hand. Well, after a fairly steep learning curve, I managed to get things working to about a 95% satisfactory level, but never managed to get that last 5% working to my liking. Thus, things stalled.

It seems I just don't have the time, focus and perhaps most importantly enthusiasm to tinker endlessly with computers any more. I'm going to try to persevere, as one of my primary technological goals over recent years has been to greatly reduce my tech footprint – that is, reduce the environmental impact of the tech that I use.

By reducing my tech footprint, I mean not only using no frikkin' AI, no world-destroying war-mongering mega-corps such as Google etc, but also reducing the footprint of the websites and services I run – GoToSocial instead of Mastodon, WriteFreely instead of Wordpress, XMPP instead of Matrix, etc. As far as not using AI or all GAFAM companies goes (ie Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft), I completely block all of the those companies at network level, using Adguard Home. Not only do I feel a great ethical weight lift from my shoulders, the web is a massively more pleasant place to frequent without those companies polluting it.

I hope to write an extended article on this subject in the future.