Over the past few days I have been using my evening hours to work on my website (a little hobby project, so you will). If you have visited my site before some of the changes are probably clear: The colour theme changed, the styling is updated and it comes with a blog now.

Behind the scenes my website has gone through over a few iterations since I have first published it around a year ago. It started of as a simple HTML file and a custom CSS style sheet I wrote from scratch. However, maintaining it turned out to be more of a hassle than I would have liked, so I ported most of it to Emacs’ org-mode and used the export and publishing features of that to construct my website. This was fine so long as it was a single page site with links to some notes I wrote.

However, at some point I decided I would like to take a dab at blogging and my MacGyvered system underlying the website was no longer so convenient as it was first conceived. So I put the blogging idea off. Until I thought of it again.

The problem was two-fold. On the one hand, students asked my during tutorial sessions some questions that sparked further ideas, that would have been nice to elaborate on later. On the other hand, I was sometimes doing some mathematics and felt like I wanted to tell someone about it (and a blog post published into the nothingness seems palatable than giving a random person a short unsolicited lecture on some mathematics I am thinking about at any given moment). But I was not ready for building a blog into my org-mode publishing setup.

So last week, I finally decided to do something about it. Over the course of a few days, I ported my website to Astro, a static site generator that gave me both the freedom to build whatever I would want, and an ecosystem of tools and plug-ins that does most of the heavy lifting for me.

Besides porting to Astro, I have made to big changes to my website. The first is the use of TailwindCSS for the styling. I was always curious about Tailwind, so I decided to give it a go and I am happy about how it turned out. The other is the implementation of a simple blog into my website, which you have found by now (given that you are reading this).

So what will this blog be for? I will probably write about mathematics as I am a mathematician in the end. It might be some random thought about the things I am thinking about at any moment. It might be a series of posts about some theory I am learning. And just to put it out there: It might be some attempts at more PopSci writing, something I find interesting, but have no experience in whatsoever.

Besides mathematical posts, I might write about books I am reading or have read (I am an avid reader), or more philosophical posts (another thing I am interested in, but do not really put time and effort in at the moment).

That’s it for me now. When my next post will be? Your guess is as good as mine. If you want to comment, feel free to reach out to me.