About this iteration

I've tried building my personal website in several ways. The first was Wix. I think I experimented with WordPress at one point. Once I really started programming, I learned Flask and used that for a while. Now, in the spirit of the beautifully simple web1.0 sites I keep discovering, I'm learning PHP and starting over from scratch. Ideally this will allow me to get used to consistently writing instead of tweaking the design.

I won't be tracking this project in a public git repository (I used to do this religiously) as I found that the satisfaction of seeing a populated contribution heatmap on my profile led to less meaningful contributions. In many commits I was just moving things around and updating styles.

For the time being, I won't be implementing a database. I enjoyed learning about PHP and SQL in college courses, but I simply don't have enough data to justify taking the time to design the schema. I came up with a basic file naming convention that makes it easy to organize posts by date and show their titles, and that's plenty for now. Eventually, tags and search may be useful.

I've kept a journal for about five years now (increasingly more like a commonplace book), which has been a great way to keep track of thoughts, notes, plans, etc. This site is like a public journal in that it follows my interests, but the writing should be more refined since it's visible to others.