Every few years (or decades, now) I feel compelled to start a blog. Well today in 2025 at the ripe age of 42 I'm giving it another go. What's different this time? I'm older and I think I'm less self involved. I hope to use this space to share projects, experiences, and thoughts. I hope that by doing this, I can clarify my own thinking and deepen conversations with friends-- past, present and future. Wish me luck!
Notes on tech:
- I dusted off my old dreamhost account to host this. jaymung.com is still alive (see my hand crafted notepad HTML) but probably doesn't show up in any search engines due to accessibility noncompliance and lack of modern standards.
- I was hoping for some dead simple CMS, sort of like posterous back in the day but self hosted. Seeing how people have been posting screenshots of Notes.app to socials, I would have loved a simple "export to blog" option from that app. Maybe someday.
- I tried the wordpress 1 clck install. It worked well but was slow and I got quickly overwhelmed by the configuration (some things haven't changed). What was interesting was how much SEO was built into the back end. No thank you.
- I asked chatGPT for recommendations on dead simple CMS and it recommended Grav and Bludit.
- I ended up using Grav, and thanks to SSH enablement and some skills I picked up at work, it was a pretty easy and lightweight self install. I did need to do some troubleshooting, and chatGPT was moderately helpful again. Lastly I chose the "chalk" theme and simplified it bit more to focus on a plain, text-forward, lightweight and responsive site. Attribution in the footer.