I finally decided to make use of a personal blog. Almost one year ago I created my academic website and a related blog, which I never used.
The background #
However, recently I started following more and more personal blogs through RSS and I started to appreciate the care and principles behind them. Moreover, I started to be interested in web development, and found myself also wanting to have a place where I could write something about my experiences, ideas, and the things I like. Of course I was able to talk about these to the people close to me, but why not share it also somewhere else?
Why not using the old blog? #
So why creating a new blog from scratch instead of actually start writing on the old one? Well, as with many things I become interested with, I want to tinker with them. The older blog (which was empty, btw) was built using Hugo and Rmarkdown and I was not confident enough to chose something that would let the user have too many liberty with the original code. You could definitely customise the site, but the combination of Hugo and RMarkdown was made so the user could have a site as ready as possible and then forget about it (at least this is how I experienced it).
I wanted something different, and looking around I found Eleventy to be exactly what I was looking for. Fast and light, with some starting templates to play around, extensive technical documentation, and the possibility to customize everything with just plain html and css. Moreover, lots of blogs and videos about it helped me to get started.
Why "Archaeoramblings"? #
This might be a non-native speaker thing, but I always liked the word "ramble". The fact that it can have the meaning of either walk outside and talk at length also resonated quite well with me.
What to expect here #
Honestly, I don't know. Definitely not consistency. I have some stuff I want to write down now and other things I have planned but about very different topics. I would like this place to be some sort of brain dump, where I write about things I do/did, side things about my work, and things I am passionate about. These includes videogames, computer stuff, archaeology, productivity, academia, open access, travels, etc.
I don't want this to be a regular or structured thing, as I think it will ruin the fun for me.
That's it for now, I will just leave the link to the rss feed here to follow the blog.