Welcome

04-27-21

Welcome to my platform on the Internet. I appreciate you stopping by! My name is medwa, but that’s essentially all you know about me at the time of me authoring this post. I’m slow to divulge all of my personal information to the entirety of the web - exhibited by my ambiguous landing page and lacking web footprint - but I’m curious to see how my perspectives and values will shape as I integrate my platform with my daily life.

This website is the best representation of my personal thoughts, values, beliefs and opinions. The social environment at work is far too brisk for in-depth conversation and the varying interests of my friends limits the subject matter. Here I am unconstrained, the only obstacle being myself.

But I digress. That’s enough about me for now. I took a fair bit of time making this entire site from scratch, so what better than a design philosophy overview as my first post?

Minimalist interface

My site’s anemic design is intentional and is not just a representation of my limited web development skills. The home page contains a simple biography, my contact email address and three links, two of which direct to this site and one external link that leads to my GitLab repositories. What more is there to display?

The post page simply displays a chronological list of posts I have written; no snippets of writing, fancy photos or taglines necessary. Speaking of tags, I have yet to integrate a post-tagging system for organization. Although I have not disregarded the idea, I fail to see the necessity given my not-so-frequent post schedule. Only time will tell. The docs page is yet to be implemented but it may take a similar approach as the post page, albeit organized categorically, not chronologically.

Posts are designed with reading in mind. There is no header nor footer, both of which I found unnecessary. Colors are minimal as well; the white text on a black background keeps the reader focused and distraction-free while significant and urgent text is constrasted in a medium-gray. Headers and links are displayed as mint-green. The colors and font have been borrowed from my terminal emulator, maintaining the continuity between the content published on this site and the tools used in the process.

Minimalist structure

My site is written as minimally as possible. There are no scripts, trackers, SEO optimization plugins, cookies or external assets. Even the font pack is hosted locally instead of pulling from google.com. The stylesheet is simple but leaves no need for JavaScript either. Additionally, the XML feed is automatically generated in Atom format providing readers a simple way to subscribe.

The web-facing content is built with the Zola static site generator. After a poor experience with other static site generators in the past I was hesitant to use another, but writing raw HTML for a blog post in the current year is nothing more than a fool’s errand. All content on this site is written in clean and minimal Markdown which makes writing significantly more convenient and enjoyable.

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This site’s source can be found on my GitLab. Feel free to poke around.

Thank you for reading!

-medwa

Tagged: updates