On New Ideas

For nearly a year, this website has been gathering dust, only growing by a single book review and a page on apples. Of the latter, to be fair, I’m very proud, and I have plans to continue it as long as apples bless the Earth. But for all my talk of sharing, I’ve been far too quiet.

On the other hand, I have no lack of ideas. There are a few exciting projects in the works that I can’t wait to share. Countless more bounce around my skull. I’m writing this now to throw some out there and give an update on what I’ve been doing to make my website better equipped.

Adding new projects to my site as it was would have been a pain. My code was already getting hacky just to support the basic structure. I want to write, create, and design, not tweak Liquid and HTML for hours. Any more creativity might have pushed the limits of Jekyll—and my sanity.

I quickly decided that the best solution was to migrate everything to Hugo. Out of the box, Hugo can handle a nested directory structure and has a simple system for HTML layouts that makes consistent formatting easy. Working with Hugo is more intuitive, adaptable, and compatible with my creative vision. So, out with Jekyll!

Having successfully transplanted my site, I’ve been able to put the technical work behind me and move on to a visual redesign. My aesthetic goal is to recreate the warm and readable feel of a book—something surprisingly difficult to do on the web. Poetry Foundation, one place that gets it right, has been a valuable inspiration.

Since last time, I’ve scaled the text for better readability and changed it to dark-on-light (because what book uses dark mode?) I also swapped the font to Garamond, my absolute favorite, especially with old-style figures. Beyond typography, I’ve made countless other tweaks here and there for that little extra polish. Now that I’m completely obsessed with tweaking the CSS to find the perfect look, I don’t think I can stop.

If I’ve been at all successful, the text should be a lot more pleasant on the eyes. With more room for words to breathe, I also hope the flow of my writing gets some of the benefit. Altogether, I hope these changes are worth the extra lines.

My goal with this website has always been to have a place to share the things I love. A creative portfolio, in other words. If web design is what it is, I should be happy, but I don’t want to design a beautiful website with nothing on it. Fortunately, that shouldn’t be a problem. I have too many ideas in the queue.

The best way to make them come alive, then, is to stash them here, no matter how underbaked they may be. At the very least, they’ll have added words to a post. I also want the added pressure of my ideas being public and the progress that comes just by putting things into words.

The first project likely to surface is a simple one. I love to read poetry, and maybe I’d love to write some too. The problem is, poems and websites don’t mix, not easily at least. I’m currently working on, maybe nearly done with, a simple system and workflow to bring poems onto the website without ruining their formatting. I’ve created something that rivals how the professionals do it, but still fits a personal site. I’ll be working on a short post with details and samples.

Around the turn of the year, watch out for another project, this time involving reading, statistics, and data visualization. Since the beginning of 2026, I’ve been collecting data on the books I’m reading and on my reading habits. With fine-grained data, I plan to make something better than the underwhelming Year in Books we get from Goodreads. I’ll have some unique aggregate measures, speed curves across pages, and other analyses. I’d like to know: does a curve of my reading speed match the plot? Can I predict page-turner moments with statistics? I’m using this project as an opportunity to learn how to work with data using tools like Pandas and R. There’s a lot of work yet to be done, but I can’t complain about having an excuse to read.

All the while, I’m still working on my penmanship, and I’ll have some pages to add to Ink in the near-ish future. For one, I’ve been playing with quills sporadically since the summer, learning to prep, cure, and cut them. I have enough material now to write something of a guide, compiling everything I’ve learned from my own experiments.

I also still want to write the occasional post about my reading. I won’t let The Lathe of Heaven be the only book I’ve written about. However, I’ve also created a new section, Works, where I hope to branch out and begin making some creative pieces of my own. Think poetry, essays, creative writing, or anything else I might write just for the sake of writing.

For the time being, my list ends there, but by no means does my motivation.

I’ll be working.