I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week.
I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of “build minutes” on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the “Photo” part of my site to compress and resize them. So, in the short term those have been removed; I wasn’t really presenting them very well anyway.
Note: There’s a follow up to this because I’ve since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more.
I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following:
My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and playing with this Hugo site, but really it would work just fine without much work at all.
Part of the problem here is metadata is hard. Someone has to sit there and fill out the author, title, subtitle, summary, page count - and they’re probably not going to do it for free. Amazon is a good at it but is hostile to publishers. Goodreads has much potential but seems to have stagnated. Linking to the book’s Wikipedia entry would be my preference but very few books have an entry.
When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed.
I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exported the magazine’s content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn’t lost forever. It’s the PearShaped Magazine Archive.
In the earliest seconds of my waking day, as my brain begins to comprehend the external world and puts away the psychedelic nonsense of my dreams, I reach for the news. Around 9.30 every morning, or earlier if I’m awoken by whatever song I’ve decided to try and numb the pain of a 9am seminar with, I unplug my phone and open up the news.
Last year, surgeons removed my grandad’s left leg below the knee. He has had the daily symptoms of diabetes for as long as I can remember. A visit to my grandparents’ house as a child meant being fascinated and unnerved in equal measure by insulin needles on the kitchen table, insulin needles piercing his belly.
My grandad is an engineer. He was a car mechanic when he was younger, he worked in a steel mill, he was a maintenance guy at hospitals. His garage is really just a workshop, with a half dozen of those huge tool cabinets, full of every size and configuration of spanner and wrench. When I was young, most of my visits there involved assembling something and playing with it. He was a hobbyist photographer: he turned his shed into a darkroom and developed pictures of street lamps in the snow.
How the language baked into the foundation of computing shapes the internet…
Deleuze and Guattari defined the rhizome as a challenge to the root-tree structure epidemic in critical thought. Since this seminal definition, the ontological structure (or lack thereof) of the rhizome has been readily applied to the internet. In its comparisons to a rhizome, the internet has been identified as an assemblage of connections that defy the problematic binarism inherent in the root-tree structure. However, challenges to this application of the rhizome are prominent. In this essay, I will explore just one of these challenges: examining the hegemonic nature of the English language as it applies to the computer, the basic building block of the internet. First, I will outline the privileged position of the English language in the basic architecture of the components of the internet, from the machine level to the level of programming language and internet protocol. Then, I will argue that this contradicts Deleuze and Guattari’s basic edict that a rhizome has no ‘hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths’ (1459), and that instead, this hegemonic power of English has formed the internet into only a partial rhizome, if not a solid structure constructed and continuously policed by discourse.