Another small corner of the web

This site endeavours to be modest: a few pages, Markdown files in a repository, lightweight styles and static HTML. That’s enough to make a place for words I want to record.

This isn’t my first foray into a personal site. It might be my first foray into a professional personal site. Honestly, I am old enough to have forgotten. Either way, it’s been an awfully long time since I wrote anything worth writing.

A home for thoughts is useful. A personal site should make it easy to put a thought somewhere permanent (or as permanent as can be when I leave domain names to expire, which mercifully is what happened to whatever previous attempts at this have ever existed).

The small corner

My first personal site was hand-crafted HTML on a cool sounding domain I’d accidentally misspelt, in 1999. It’s still available on the way-back-machine, but I’ll take the secret of how to find it to my grave.

But I’ll paint the picture: 8px, teal, Arial font, on a bright white background, too much of it centre aligned, and too small to read on today’s high resolution screens. Built under the bright fluorescent lights of the call-centre offices from which I worked, talking customers through their dial-up connectivity problems. Modest minimalism - the least amount of code to do what I needed it to. The words of a teenager who thought he had something to say.

This site is all simple markdown, rendered in teal and brass and a deep, dark green (if you’re in dark mode); the same scheme as the colour-drenched living room where I’m writing this now. It’s supposed to invoke mature modesty. It probably fails. The words of an old man, yelling at the clouds.

---
title: A useful title
date: 2026-08-31
summary: A pithy sentence describing the article.
tags: [software]
---

Infinite capacity

Almost everything else (but not the copy) chosen by a state-of-the-art AI/LLM agent, instructed by me to create this site. Given a simple prompt and some nudging, it coaxed a professional-enough personal site into existence.

This site is the least amount of code to do what I need it to do; ironically built by a system that has been trained on as much of humankind’s collective output that its creators could get their hands on. Gone are the days of hand-crafting HTML, so too the days of installing Wordpress, or hand-rolling custom content-management-systems.

We are in the end-game of software engineering now, JARVIS and FRIDAY are taking over. Our job is to keep them writing the just the least amount of code to do what we need.