My friend and I reunite after 18 months. I missed him dearly, but once we sit down for ramen we can both tell it’s like we were there yesterday. I talk about him often. He’s the person who was so discombobulated by Dutch white innocence, that he felt more comfortable going back to the Middle East to live in the closet. He’s doing better now. No more crack, and the spinning class is surprisingly inclusive. He even joined a theatre group.

• Cooler temperatures! After the hottest week I’ve experienced in months, things were back to comfortable Summer weather. By the time I’m writing this the sky is gray and it’s raining, but this week’s weather was cheerful and moderate.
• On Tuesday and Wednesday I gave two big UX workshops at week to help coworkers understand how they can use UX in their daily work. I’ve been giving workshops for well over a decade, always trusting my instinct to figure out what a particular group or context required. At work, though, we have two wonderful scrum masters who are well-versed in the art of facilitation. I learned a lot from their feedback, and saw a hugh jump between the quality of the first day and of the second day.
• I caught up with a special friend on Wednesday, a young woman I met because we were treated for the same health condition. Her life as a Psych major couldn’t be more different from mine, and yet the red threads our lives resemble one another. I’m fortunate to call her my friend.
• I had missed a few weeks in my RSS reader, but I was pleased to see Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs is off to a good start. To hell with Anja calling me a geek for being into the IndieWeb, I love visiting other people’s websites. I suspect I love reading what they have to say about those websites even more.
• Last week, I had met an amazing couple of lesbians who invited me over for a casual dinner party on Friday. After a particularly challenging week, it was comforting to hear their experiences as people of color in the world today. I’m already looking forward to inviting them to our place.
• On Saturday, Anja and I kicked off the weekend with a spontaneous redesign of our living room. We finally got rid of my desk, which was a Covid-era purchase used for our home office. What remains now is Anja’s bigger desk, which functions as a dining room table that she hates more than I do. The removal of our home office allowed us to place our sofa there, which has giving the living room a significant amount of extra space. The dining room table continues to double as an office whenever we put our ultrawide monitor there. I like modular living, and I’m feeling less and less awkward about the way we’re going about it in our house.
• At the end of our cleaning sprint Anja mentioned it was a beautiful day for this accomplishment, since it was Rosh Hashanah. New living room, new beginnings.
• After visiting Anja’s mom in the afternoon, we biked to Kriterion to Watch Oppenheimer
• Much like the last few days, I’m not in the best of states. There’s an old sadness that keeps saying hello, and I’m slowly beginning to think it might be time to get some help with it.
• I’m nearing the end of my journal, and I’m surprised by how unnervous I am by the few pages I have left. In this past, like the rest of the world, as it appears, I had trouble finishing a journal in a relaxed manner. Looking at the first entry, I see I have 29 days left until it’ll have been one year exactly. Hello nerves.

Every time I embark on a journey towards a published post about why it’s good to have a website, I get lost in the reality of personal details. Everyone has different reasons for believing something. Aiming to take them all into account doesn’t help me write anything that feels worthwhile and not like a derivative¹.

It feels much more relevant to focus my attention on specific people. In this case I’m focusing my attention on you, Nienke. I think you should have a personal website. Let me tell you why.

Recently, I’ve been making some great progress with my personal website. While I normally don’t engage in technical ballets on the goings-on of this website, I feel it’s relevant to document what I’ve learnt and done, if only for posterity.

Tools

• Jekyll: as is often the case for me, this site is built using my favorite flat-file content management system
• Github: hosts the code for this website
• Netlify: serves the content to my website
• Obsidian: I write in a single Obsidian vault
• obsidian-git: helps me manage the version control of my Obsidian content
• Push git subdirectory as branch: a Github action that lets me publish a part of the content of my Obsidian vault to a separate repository
• Git submodule: my separate repository is pulled into my website’s code base
• Netlify build hook: every day, Netlify looks for new content and publishes it to my website

Why this is great

• I hold the strong belief that tools don’t matter. This means, among other things, that I don’t like to be limited to using particular platforms or apps to write. I want to see my files in a folder that I can move around. Jekyll allows me to do just this.
• My website is a text-heavy space: most of what you’ll find on here is written content. As a knowledge worker, writing is an integral part of my daily life. Many of the things I write are not for public consumption, but they are closely linked to things that are. To avoid duplicate content and awkward linking, it was important for me to manage my text files in a single space, one Obsidian vault.
• I have a tendency to tinker a lot on my website. This can make it so that I spend more time trying out new things and changing the design than I do writing. Having my code base and content separated helps me focus more on writing things that are meaningful to me.

Some things I haven’t figured out yet

• Is it worthwhile for me to publish more granular IndieWeb post types such as notes and likes? Do I care about them? Am I making them only to show them? What’s their value if I cannot automate this process? Does the technical implementation change if I push said content to a git repository that consists of only notes?
• What does a proper dark mode look like?
• Do I want to continue my barebones experiment and document the discomfort of vanity? Or am I ready for something more modern?
• How in the world do I even go about Micropub and Webmentions?

Brushing my teeth on Friday morning, I think about the weekend ahead, secretly complaining that my social engagements will keep me from getting the rest I need. Then I remember Easter Monday. The true marker of my mid-thirties is the excitement I feel at the prospect of a bed, and nothing but it.

I hold a baby this week, one of my favorite ones. His face has two states that exist simultaneously: the one of utter shock and surprise only newborns can have, and the one that reminds you that babies know everything about the world and forget it as soon as they start to speak. He laughs when I bop his nose, although I quickly learn that the force with which I bop Anja’s adult nose shan’t be applied here.

I am nostalgic about the way the Web used to be. I miss the handcrafted blogs that I used to visit, and the intimate windows they gave me into the lives of strangers.

I miss that I knew all the domain names by heart. It is a phantom pain of sorts; an unrest in the tip of my fingers reminding me I no longer need to make series of key combinations to find those personal public spaces, some more arts-and-craftsy than others, because most of them are gone. These days, I just circulate through a small number of news sites, like I did when I first got online as a young girl, not yet having found my way around the Internet.