clara's web page

musings about blogs and writing

Writing a blog software is fun. It is a very cozy and meditative activity to do over the course of a long weekend, Christmas break, or on a long train ride. Unfortunately, actually maintaining the blog has never been that much fun, at least not for me.

However, I want to change that! I do think blogs are a cool medium and I am always jealous at my friends when I see their blogs, constantly populated for almost a decade, with my web site being an empty space compared to theirs.

Paradoxically, writing prose in itself has never been something I have been opposed with. For the past 4 years, I wrote lots of personal diary entries, weekly mails to my friends (some readers may remember), and even more shit posts on Fedi. However, publishing this prose has always felt weird to me in the sense, that I fear I have "nothing important to say" or that "nobody is going to read that anyways".

changing the mind set

In the summer of 2023, I was reading Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, which had a great impact on me. More specifically, I learned about his concept of a revolt, a concept to which the constant seeking of new experiences in order to emphasis one's freedom in the response to a meaningless universe is crucial.

To put this into less abstract words: I like to make myself uncomfortable; hence why I want to try out blogging for real this time, although without making any promises about the frequency, the language, the audience, or anything else. This blog will primarily be for myself. 🙂

giving this web site a re-design

As you may have seen in the past weeks or so, I have given this web site a re-design. More specifically, I dropped support for mobile devices and oriented the design towards a 1990s GeoCities style, which I really enjoy as it feels like it gives this web site a certain "soul".

Of course, none of these blog posts can be considered complete without talking about the over-engineered stack that powers it.

For this web site, I have decided for a setup that matches the design it has: Stupid HTML + PHP. More specifically, every web page is a raw HTML document, that simply contains a require "header.php"; as well as a require "footer.php"; inside, with some top-level variable definitions like $title = "Foo Bar";. However, the web site is statically compiled PHP, meaning I merely use PHP as a templating engine, i.e. M4 on steroids. The compilation is done by a simple chain of find(1) commands invoking cp(1) for static files and php(1) for PHP files, eventually rendering them into respective stand alone HTML documents. All of this is wrapped in a Nix flake of course, to destroy the simplicity it originally had. 🙂

Besides, this setup allows me to be creative and to eventually integrate dynamic components as well, if I ever feel an urge to. Last but not least, these technologies are here to stay. PHP has been declared dead too many times, but it is still around to this, for the better or worse … 😉