Graffiti Village

So, I've recently managed to get image and media uploading working the way I want now, so thought I'd share some images from my last little trip out to Allen Brickworks in Halifax!

My housemates took their FPV drones out, and thought I'd tag along and shoot some photos. It's surprisingly difficult to shoot something like this, as every scene tends to look 'busy' with the amount of graffiti and decrepit architecture that's there; but, I managed to get a few shots I liked, and I've edited them somewhat to give them a more filmic, contrasty look.

Camera used: Sony RX100 V. Photos edited in Darktable!

Permalink | 20220325-graffiti-village

Hello World!

So, this is my first blog entry. I've never really done anything like this before so I'm not sure if there's any particular right or wrongs that should be adhered to in blogmaking!

Why?

So, I've been wanting to do something like this for quite some time; I've always loved the idea of having some space on the web where I can just rant and ramble and talk about things that I find interesting. Initially, I thought that social media might be a good place for that, and that was where most of my initial posts all those years ago went -- mostly just me showing off on Facebook little embedded projects I've made, or a fancy new headphone setup... However, it always just felt that I was either lost in the algorithm, or just broadcasting my life to the 95% of people in my friends list that probably didn't care whatsoever. Something like Twitter might've been good for this, but there's really only so much you can say in a limited amount of characters, and unless you cake your stuff in hashtags, it'll probably never get seen by anyone.

Thus, here we are, I'm writing a blog that I absolutely sure won't be seen by all that many people; and that's absolutely fine! The reason why? Well, I'm of the opinion that the internet has come to favour quantity over quality, the number of interactions, likes, comments, subscribes, etc. People getting obsessed about their 'reach', for their quick shortform content that only serves to become irrelevant hours later; or, through a strike of good luck, get 'viral' and spread across the net for millions of people to observe, only to be forgotten about when the next big thing comes along. Those peaks and troughs are not something I want to subscribe to, but to have a permanent record of my thoughts and feelings unmanaged by any algorithms, and unobserved by analytics -- an echo chamber where I have no idea who's looking, and a place where I'm not drowning in the ebbs and flows of a faux popularity contest.

How?

I guess I should probably cover the tech stuff behind this since that's probably going to be one of the main topics of this site! It's actually quite simple in the grand scheme of things; I wanted something that didn't tie me to a particular language, CMS, build or runtime. Just simple HTML files in a folder and no reliance on Javascript or any frontend specialisms.

To do this, I've wrote a tool in Ruby called 'katei' (Japanese for "home"), which grabs a bunch of Markdown files and creates a static site from them, and manages blog-style pages for me too. It's pretty horribly written, but it was something mostly to automate me hand-crafting HTML with multiple includes and dependency management and styles and all that stuff. Markdown is simple to write, and when I commit-and-push this on Git, it'll get updated automagically.

The whole thing runs from an S3 bucket, and exposed to the wider internet with CloudFront. I'm pretty familiar with AWS, but haven't really played around with any of the Code Pipeline stuff, nor CloudFront, so this is some good practise, and it helps keeps costs low versus running a VPS and having one more thing I have to tinker around with. This is just simple and quick for me :)

Permalink | 20220316-Hello-World