Sometimes people tell me that my perspective on a topic is insightful and thought provoking. If I hear this often enough for a specific point, I will feel the urge to share these insights with a broader audience. This is motivated in part by a desire to explore these ideas more deeply, and partly to engage in a broader conversation on the topic.
To date, I had always let this momentum falter, and eventually the point sinks out of relevance or stops being interesting to me, and so fades away. So I figured that if I ever want to start sharing information, then I need to put some effort in to make this happen.
In order to finally address need for tooling that allows me to address this desire, I decided to learn the skills needed to build this site as a hobby project. It is written in python, html, css, and finally some javascript if and where it is absolutely necessary, typically for modules as required by a given page. As an example, check out this equation for a basic ReLu activated artificial neuron:
$$\text{max}\left(\left(b+\sum_i w_ix_i\right),0\right)$$
Beautiful. What is even better is that I keep things lean by only loading modules as are required on a per page/article basis. I figure your device evaluating a single IF statement before downloading bunch of scripts it might not even need is a pretty neat way to cut back on pointless overhead and risks.
The website is a flask powered webapp, hosted on heroku. The primary purpose of this site is to ingest markdown formatted articles with yaml headers that I upload. These are then converted to a blog format like what you are reading here. The yaml headers include toggles for things like "math" which if set to true indicates we'll need mathjax, and it enables a block in the header that directs your browser to also download the required scripts, which in turn allows the math expression above to render properly.
I am quite happy with this little project, and have thoroughly enjoyed my first steps into web-development. I welcome feedback on how to improve my website, but keep in mind the core design principle behind this site is information first, efficiency second, everything else if, and only if, it helps support the first two points. To that end, no I will not run your ads. Advertisement in it's current form is a blight on our species, and I refuse to partake. I do have some ideas on how to improve the problem inherent to advertisement, but these will not be popular ideas. If you're interested, you can find it here
Sure, I could have used WordPress, as I had been, but the drama surrounding that project has given me the push to finally make a website I take pride in. Something sleek and efficient. Something that does precisely what I need, and does it well.