Here to stay?
For a while I have had two items on my to-do list. One said "Archive website" and the other said "Get one-page website". I thought I was over having a blog, and as part of simplifying my life, I was going to do away with it— more or less—and replace it with something like this (from one of my other websites that does nothing):
The front page of a private website
Then, today, into my RSS feed came Winners of the 2022 Best Personal Academic Websites Contest. My first thought was, what's the difference between an Academic Website and any other? "The contest recognizes the best personal websites of: Faculty, Professors, Scientists, Postdocs, Grad students, Independent researchers". They are all pretty polished for sure. And it's a very different list compared to, say, 20 Best Academic Blogs and Websites which has classics such as The Thesis Whisperer. As a side note, I had forgotten how good the Thesis Whisper is … and it's not just about theses. Her post on What can we expect in the next phase of the pandemic? is jam-packed with meaty food for thought.
But back to the theme of this post; killing or keeping my site.
I've gone with keeping it. Looking at it, I really like it. The integrations with Emacs for creating posts and webmentions is pretty smooth now.
But yes, there are things to be done. The workflow around Indieweb is a bit clunky. I have to run a script that picks up any new mentions from Webmention. It's clunky and I need to do some stuff to automate it so that when new mentions are found, it rebuilds the site. But then I need to put is some checking in case someone 'bombs' the site with junk. For now, at least, it will stay a manual process.
The workflow around images is also clunky; I have to move them manually into the right directory. That dissuades me from using more images. Fixing that might take some more time learning elisp to integrate it into my Emacs workflow. We'll see …
But, the main thing is that commonplace book of mine is staying.