About this site
site goals
this site is intentionally plain (for now). i had a realization that i cared too much about the presentation and less about the subject, so my goal is that, by scaling it back entirely - this site has only a handful of CSS rules - i can build up a catalog of things i wish to share, and then design the layout of the site to match. makes sense, to me. this is a writing exercise more than anything, at this point. what good is a website if there is nothing on it? well, plenty good! it’s just not my vision for myself.
it won’t always look like this. but i want to build the routine habit (daily, even?) of writing for my web page, rather than tinkering with it. the lackluster design is an effort to put the subject matter of the page at the forefront.
future plans
i have plans that i cannot reveal to you right now or the haters will sabotage me.
the common idea i am trying to communicate is that “there should be something here, and i need to bring myself to work on it rather than tinkering with front-end presentation or back-end coolness”. some sections i’d like to incorporate here…
links
a well-formed links page. my ideal web relies on surfing - on links! i feel a sense of duty to have more external hyperlinks - i want visitors to saturn.town to feel that it is a waypoint on their journey, and not keep them here by linking only to pages on my site.
“posts”
the idea is that entries would be dated, but not necessarily presented as “posts” in a traditional linear blog timeline. more as essays, or pages, or creative writing, or what-have-you. perhaps this comes with an eventual RSS feed.
photo log
i pay a small amount for a voip phone number so i can say my Western Bell rotary telephone truly works. (pay-as-you-go, nobody really calls - this is strictly “just cool” and wait why am i justifying my financial decision?) i discovered that they provide a fairly simple and well-documented REST API that allows interfacing with things like SMS, MMS, voicemail, etc. some of these features cost extra but SMS/MMS is included for a small amount; fractions of a cent per message.
ALL THIS TO SAY, in the last iteration of my website, i used this API to automatically publish a photo to the site (if it came from my phone number). it was handy and helped me take more pictures, for a little while; something i’d like to do more of.
status/update/”Now” page
i just think it’s neat. i could perhaps leverage the SMS API, as with photos, to update this on-the-go.
Lore of Saturn Town
there really isn’t much, but i kinda think there should be. wouldn’t that be so neat? my plan is to add small things to the site that make it feel more like an environment. one example is a weather simulation, a forecast for a fictional place. maybe it’s windy out! maybe there’s a string of sunny days. oh dear, there’s a tornado.
bullet-goals
a punchlist, of sorts.
- changelog page. brief descsription/dates of site updates.
- site navigation. maybe it’s a nested list.
- painless deployment. rsync, git hooks, something where i can write in one place (that’s not on the server) and it’s live.
a technical note
this site does not use anything other than html + css (for now). No static site generators - one hundred percent hand-typed HTML. i am not using iframes or server-side-includes or any other tool to put the common page elements in place. the purpose of this is two-fold: one, to further the content-matter-first approach as stated above, and second, to remove any technical bikeshedding/yakshaving/procrastination that i tend to find myself fall into, in the same way i do for site design. again, this is a temporary decision - one that absolutely will change in the future, once my habits are more solidified.
in the meantime, if you, the reader, see some inconsistency in the layout, please let me know so i may fix it.
–hermit