It's 2022 now, and I haven't updated my website since 2017. So, I guess one question is, am I still here? Am I still alive, and, if so, why haven't I updated anything?
The answer is
- Yes, I am still here (as of Monday, May 16th 2022), to the extent that one can be "here" where "here" is a website.
- By virtue of 1, yes I am still alive (again, as of Monday, May 16th 2022). I haven't figured out how to update things without me being alive. Yet.
- Hexo (version 2) stopped working for me, and I haven't figured out a good replacement for it. I also became pretty busy (read: stressed) with my PhD work. I've kept putting things off.
I'm still making things, but I haven't really put them into blog format. For example, I made a poster for Society for NeuroEconomics 2021. I've made a few internal visualizations using ClojureScript for the Erlich Lab too.
Am I going to update my actual website? Yes. Probably. Hopefully. As soon as I figure out how to template stuff without breaking my old posts. I'll probably try to make a simple static site generator in ClojureScript (I know some already exist, I'll probably use those.).
I'm not sure that I'll continue to write things in Markdown, if only because I find it eventually limits your flexibility. It's kind of weird that nowadays I'm starting to actually like XML (except for the crazy fact that you can't nest comments or CDATA). XML lets you tie data to text in a machine-readable way. Compare that with other markup formats.
- Markdown lets you write markup in a human-readable way.
- Org mode let's you write markup also in a human-readable way, and sometimes attach data, but there are few parsers that can read raw .org files.
- JSON and edn let you make data, but actually editing text with them is pretty annoying. I should know, I wrote a bunch of presentations using Hiccup in Reagent, and that got cumbersome pretty fast.
- LaTeX isn't machine readable, wasn't designed for the web, and I find that I end up programming with it any time things get too complicated.
- .txt files are just text (albeit that you can add cool ASCII/ANSI art to).
- I'm not writing anything in MS Word/LibreOffice.
Writing things in plain HTML is also an exercise in minimalism. Writing this HTML file, for example, doesn't require much in the way of external tools. It won't break when Hexo 2 upgrades to Hexo 3. But, it does look ugly as hell, and I can never remember the right way to specify an HTML file with a DOCTYPE. I guess I'll just make a skeleton for it.
Anyway, I guess I'll upload this file now. See you in another five years.