Broken Links and Readibility

In Service of the Reader.

I like reading. Books, blogs, newsletters, flyers, magazines,... you get it. Major part of reading is the reading experience. Sometimes when I come across a blog that has a very clear design, I am delighted, and immediately in love with it. A clean design is a service to the readers. There are no distracting advertisements, no pop-ups, no changing banners, or auto-playing videos. The design, the layout, the typography, all carefully placed to serve the most important reason I am visiting the site - the content. Or specifically, the text that I am reading.

That's the first thing I want to address with this redesign. Interestingly, a cleaner reading experience means getting rid of most of the code on your website. There are no tags, social links, and comment boxes. These are not for the readers but for the writers. I've replaced the Jekyll build system that I was using to compile this site with a custom one written in Python. It gives me more control. But an outcome of a new build system is that it will break often. So previous links will not work and the new ones might break.

Static (or lack there of).

Redesigning the website is reflecting again on what is important for the reading experience. Like refactoring a code, it is born out of a need to change something; to improve something. And like code, this change is also driven by redefining its objectives. The very reason for the website's existence.

I find static posts poetic - a snapshot of the author's beliefs and knowledge at the point of writing. The attempt to articulate this for the internet with a post immortalised with its mistakes and undersigned ideologies before the experience of time. Human expression with human execution.

For a site that serves as my corner on the internet, I prefer Andy Matuschak's Evergreen Notes. A site is an author's knowledge bank. A service he does to himself in trying to navigate his unstructured mind. So, the contents of a site should not only grow but change form as the time passes. That's the other thing I want to change with this redesign. A place not for static musings, but for evolving knowledge and reflections.

Consolidation.

And finally, with this redesign, I want to bring my writings from across the internet to a single place. Before this refactor, I only had technical articles here, and posted my essays, stories, and poems on different sites. I want to gather all of them here under a single expanding list.

Fin.