This website is written in plain text with Vim and generated by Jekyll using Personal from Jekyll Themes. I use Hover for domain management. The updates page is a Micro.blog hosted on my own subdomain. To display my Twitter archive, I downloaded my tweets and then produced a static site that turns every tweet into its own page, using the tweetback script created by Zach Leatherman. My open research notebook runs on Pandoc and Gitit.
Older Sites
I first started building webpages in the waning years of the last century. I took an intro to programming course in college, but the first time I remember working with HTML was actually, of all places, in an undergraduate horticulture course that required us to make a webpage for a project on genetically modified foods. I was hooked.
The oldest (extant) website I made, using old-fashioned HTML, was for an online undergraduate journal of humanities in the year 2000. In graduate school, I had a weblog on Blogger (2004-2006) and learned a lot more about HTML and CSS by fiddling with its theme.
At my first job after graduate school, I went back to HTML to make simple websites like this one; most of my course webpages at DU looked like that too, though few seem to have been perserved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I only have local copies now.
When I moved to Rice, my personal website and posts like my advice on how to read continued to be hosted as HTML pages on a drive provided by the university. But in 2009, I started a Wordpress site and a Twitter account, and I began running courses in Wordpress, too, like this one from 2012.
There was also a brief experiment with Tumblr around that time, but it’s telling that in 2012 I clipped (or tumbled?) Anil Dash’s influential lament for “The Web We Lost” (now here). Like Dash, I missed the feeling of empowerment I got from learning how to hack together HTML and CSS enough to make a website that truly felt like it was mine.
In the meantime, I had fallen hard for Pandoc and writing in plain text, and I remember going to a THATCamp at Rice University in 2011 where a session on Unix and regular expressions, taught by Ben Brumfield, blew my mind.
In 2012, empowered by what Ben taught us, I wrote a bash script that produced a static site using pandoc and built-in Unix commands. Posts were written in Markdown, and for a long time the site looked something like this. I started learning more about programming by taking a Rice University Coursera course on Python and doing lessons from The Programming Historian. Then, from 2014 to 2017, I worked on the editorial team for that site and played a role in moving it from Wordpress onto GitHub Pages, using Pandoc, bash scripts, and Python to make the transition. That taught me a ton about git, GitHub, and Jekyll too.
All that learning made some new web experiments possible. In 2014, I created a Twitter bot. In 2016, I wrote a web application, a tool to generate dates for syllabi. And in 2018, I picked up a limited amount of PHP: enough to modify an Omeka installation that hosts the Harvey Memories Project.
Finally, I started this current site around 2019 as I was preparing for the release of my second book. In short, this site exists only because I slowly—often very slowly—picked up bits and pieces of knowledge at each step in my adventures on the Internet, with the help of a lot of people who were willing to share what they knew.
And it all started with HTML in a horticulture class.