A New Backend for mccd.space

I made some major changes to the backend of mccd.space. Before, It used Eleventy as its blogging engine and was hosted on Sourcehut. The setup worked pretty well, but I thought it could be even better. I am a fan of minimalism: I don't really like Markdown, I don't really like Node, I am not sure if a revision history makes sense for a blog and I also wanted to support more protocols than just http. Thus, I wanted to build my own blog engine, and I wanted it on my own server.

I think the focus right now in the tech industry is on static, pre-compiled, immutable systems that are exported somewhere to be run. But to me, Lisp, Smalltalk, Plan9 and Unix reflected far more interesting ideas. So, I want this new backend to be thought of not as something complete, but rather an ongoing investigation into how I can combine some old ideas with newer technologies.

For the visuals of mccd.space I faced a dilemma. While I'm fond of minimalism, it seems like every big-tech companies have adopted the facade of it too. Big-tech websites are ostensibly minimal, but are bogged down by javascript and trackers. So I got inspired to experiment with a new sort of minimalist aesthetic for the site that stays true to me, but also distinguishes mccd.space more from "big tech aesthetics". I am a fan of 16th to 19th century sketches, schematics, cartography, typography. The redesigned frontpage expresses some of that appreciation.

- Marc