connecting in (welcome)

Questions, comments, thoughts? Email me at matisse[email protected](at)onward:)lyfaring(dot)com. I’d love to hear from you!

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connecting out (thank you)

The shape of this website has been influenced by many, many other personal websites & projects. A few salient examples:

• I could not have imagined creating my own site without hyperlink.academy’s Internet Homesteading course, which introduced me to the strange and lovely world of the indie web, and gave me the technical foundations I needed to start participating myself. I learned to write raw html and to use Eleventy, and I created my first site, onwardlyfaring.neocities.org. I want the freedom to tinker around and make silly decisions and create what I can think of; this format is a delight for playing.
• René Winkelmeyer’s Eleventy Chirpy blog template forms the basis for this site – thank you!! I barely know how to code but nevertheless wanted the flexibility and intimacy of a small, simple site; this template gave me the confidence to move forward, and I’ve been getting to know the underpinnings of the tech better and better. I’ve had to make some changes (e.g. getting rid of dark mode because it was not worth the headache), and eventually I will probably want to move away from the fixed sidebar (I think it is distracting) and have a static site that I have build more from the ground-up, that feels better to me – but this has been a lovely starting place and learning experience.
• I love Michael Nielson’s musings about how to use a personal website, and I in particular love his comments there about how, with journal articles, the title and abstract serve not only as marketing for the paper, but also as anti-marketing: it makes it very easy for people not to read the paper. He is worried there about the form of blogging, that people subscribe to the blog as a whole, rather than each post finding its own audience, and what effects this might have on the author. While I am not too concerned with blogging as a medium, I am trying to adopt the practice of including abstracts for anti-marketing for content and links – though certainly I am mostly falling short of this ideal!
• The section headers for experiments on my site – intentions, questions, notes, results – was taken very directly from Rob Hardy’s The Experimentalist Notion template. The visual of the progress bubbles was lifted from Ethan Reeder’s Intentions. I think the proximate cause for the formatting of experiments as cards was Evy’s reading; it was viewing the source of that page that convinced me I was capable of implementing experiments at all.
• The hyperlink formatting on Ben Kuhn’s website was more or less revelation to me.
• The carousel on Q&A is ill-conceived, as all carousels are. That said, the code is directly adapted from Jennifer Wjertozch’s instructions for CSS-only carousels, and honestly, I’m delighted.