About this website

Motivation

But why? Isn’t it a lot easier to just use an existing platform to post things on, and let the platform handle everything from editing and layout to distribution? Probably. But from the couple of years I’d been writing on my blog - with long breaks in between - I kept running into a recurring issue: writing a whole article takes a long time. The cycle of collecting a bunch of thoughts, laying them out in a long string of words, and then publishing them in finished form once and for all, just didn’t quite fit my style.

I mean, I’m thinking about languages and learning languages all the time. If you follow me on social media, you’ll have seen the regular stream of short random linguistics findings and random thoughts I’ve been having on a consistent basis. But these aren’t generally the kinds of things that would make sense to write a whole article on. On the other hand, social media posts are a bit too transient - you can enjoy them for maybe a day, and then they’re flooded out of your feed by endless new content. Sure you can search for individual old posts, but the discoverability of past content isn’t the best if you’re just looking for various things within a given topic.

Another reason I wanted to try making a website is just because I can. I work in tech, and although my day job mainly involves data analysis rather than app or web development, I have dabbled in some of the relevant technologies over the years. Having a long-running project to work on seems like a good way to keep up those skills and learn new things about how the web works.

Technical Notes

This website is built using SvelteKit and Vercel.

But why Svelte? As a matter of fact, the main web development framework I’ve used in the past has been React, but a few months ago I came across an article that praised the virtues of Svelte, and I have to say I was intrigued. I don’t think I’ve experienced either of these frameworks extensively enough yet to say that one is definitely better than the other, but so far working with Svelte has felt refreshingly simple for the most part.

To start off, I used of a couple of templates templates to get the project off the ground: a generic Sveltekit template and another template which includes more blog-specific logic like post management and categories.

Technically, things aren’t particularly fancy at the moment. I’ve just had to implement a couple of custom components for display purposes (a multilingual lemma element, and a custom-made implementation of the masonry layout). As I add more content to the site, I may also need to come up with more scalable ways of keeping track of my posts.

Inspiration

Over the past several months, as I’ve been trying to figure the shape and direction my new website should take, I bookmarked countless personal websites whose design could be useful to me: some of the top ones include designer/anthropologist Maggie Appleton, AI researcher Gwern Branwen, and the long list of contributors to the collection of articles at The Internet Used to be Fun

Roadmap

This is still a relatively new website, and at the time of launch I just wanted to have a couple of articles ready - this one, one in-depth article about my own language learning experience, one more general article about all the languages I’m working on, and a deep dive into one specific language.