This post was archived from blog.jenigrant.com

A long time ago, I had a blog.

I'd named it after a Japanese word - to live, ikiru - not knowing that Kurosawa had directed a masterpiece by the same name. (I was 19, I didn't know shit.) It was built back in the days where the only interaction development online was CGI, so it was lean, text files and server side includes. Eventually I shut it down, for reasons unremembered. Knowing the Internet of the late 90s and my own prediliction to run away from any attention whatsoever, I probably had started getting some traction.

I'd start a couple more over the years, always in WordPress, but WordPress has always been a bit overblown for my tastes. I'd spend all my energy working to produce something that looked exactly like every other site out there and more time tweaking and updating services than writing or photographing. They never got traction because I never really felt like my self was in them.

Lately, though, with the overall instability of corporate run social media, I've thought a lot about starting something new. Something more like Ikiru, built from scratch-ish. Something where I can write down my own thoughts and this time, not building it to cater to an audience of unknowns. Build it first and foremost for myself.

Eleventy is close enough to the land of text files and server side includes to serve as a starting point. I'd like to integrate some sort of federated social media, so lately I've been mucking around with Shuttlecraft. If you notice that both use text as their storage for posts, that's intentional. It won't last forever, but I figure I've got a couple thousand posts to work with before it becomes an issue.

I don't really forsee myself trying to build "a brand" off of this so much so as I'm just tired of seeing so much of myself sold to the highest bidder for whatever analysis and refinement they can get away with. Look, the Internet was orginally a void, I'm old and I wanna yell at it. I don't want it repackaged back to me as advertisements, I want to yell at clouds and have it be utterly meaningless.

Ergo.