Flight of the Pelican
Dawn of a new day.
Published:
I love Markdown; it makes it easy to write and format stuff for the internet. And for a while, I’ve wanted to publish more easily by just… writing in Markdown and dropping it somewhere. Now, I can finally do just that.
The world is generally in a bit of a state, I think it’s fair to say. A rising tide of fascism doesn’t lift all boats though, it mostly wants to blow everything else out of the water. Big platforms are broadly either siding with fascists, or siding against trans people, and so now felt like the right time to actually move to make something I damn near wholly control. So, here we are, I’ve moved stuff off of Medium and onto my new website, built on Pelican, a static site generator that lets me drop in Markdown files and turn them into organized pages!
I’ve spent a couple days on this initial version, tweaking things to make sure they were readable and then doing some additional formatting on the pieces I’ve already written and previously published. Pelican even lets me backdate them easily, so they all show the dates when they were originally published. A few things from the pandemic era, etc.
I’ve built the site on top of Pelican’s simple theme, a classless (!) base template that let me readily iterate and tweak things. Lots of cool stuff I’ve been able to do, and more to come. It’s been more or less built from zero, and the site, in it’s current form, should mostly work across mobile and desktop. If you spot issues, please let me know on either Bluesky or by email. Feel free to direct questions you have there too; I’d be happy to answer them!
I’m ashamed to say that there’s not a ton here right now though. I’ve held off writing big pieces again for a number of reasons, but sometimes the beast in me awakens anew and beckons me back. I’ve been writing more recently; smaller bits and pieces focused on the things I’m playing through. The Den’s Games Club, as part of my Discord community, has been good motivation for me to get back at it and start jamming on longer stuff, but I’m always divided across a few different things I’m doing. Streaming, videos, writing, and sometimes just taking advantage of the downtime I have for myself. Trying to be creative and standing mostly on my own to do so in this current climate is hard work!
The ultimate hope is that the things I write and create can give people some respite. A little comfort in a storm, before we all head back out there together.
I have eev.ee to thank for first mentioning Pelican on her socials. She’s responsible for the gears starting to turn again, thus dusting off the web dev hat, and I’m grateful for that.
Unrelated screenshot. Thanks for reading!