Hello, world

Hi. I’m Spencer, welcoming you to my new blog. I intend to post about Emacs, programming languages, music tech, and all manner of weird and wonderful things. In the meantime, some brief notes about the site itself will have to do.

How it’s made

Speaking of Emacs, I’ll be writing my posts in Org mode. From there it’s a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine involving Pandoc to convert from Org to HTML — I’m not crazy about Org mode’s export feature — with everything tied together using Clojure.

Since I don’t want to spin up a full JVM for each render, I’ve opted to use Babashka, a stripped-down Clojure environment running on GraalVM. It boots really fast and comes with Hiccup, which I’m using to generate the rest of my HTML.

All styling is done with plain CSS, using Flexbox for layout. There is no JavaScript, and I’ve made sure everything looks decent in text-mode browsers like w3m and Lynx. That’s easy enough to do, and I think more accessibility is always a good thing.

How it’s hosted

For the time being, I’m using Cloudflare Pages, and manually building/pushing all updates. I have plans for how I can automate things and perhaps begin self-hosting on my VPS, but I wanted to wait until I got the ball rolling with a post or two.

Getting in touch

You can find my contact info at the bottom of every page. I respond to emails pretty quickly, and I’m active on Mastodon. Any thoughts and opinions are welcome.