Moving the notebook
These notes used to live somewhere else. For several years they sat in an older notebook of mine, a site I set up in an afternoon and then barely touched, which over time collected a theme I no longer liked, a comment system nobody used and a build step I had to look up every single time. This week I moved the notes to this address and took the chance to throw most of that away.
The new version is about as plain as a website can be. Every page is a hand-written HTML file. There is one stylesheet, which picks a light or dark palette depending on the reader's setting, and nothing else: no scripts, no fonts fetched from anywhere, no counters. The whole site is smaller than a single photograph from my phone. I check it into the same place as everything else I write and copy it up when it changes.
I had worried that writing HTML by hand would be tedious. It is a little, for about a page. After that the shape of each file is so familiar that the markup disappears and I am only thinking about the words, which is more than I could say for the old setup, where I spent a surprising amount of time thinking about front matter.
Only the notes I still stand behind came across. That was a smaller set than I expected. Some of the old ones were about tools I no longer use. A few were simply wrong, in a way that reading them a few years later made obvious, and I did not want to keep correcting them. The ones that made it keep their original dates, because those dates are part of what the notes are: a record of what I thought at the time, not what I think now.
The move cost a few links. If you followed an old address and landed on the not-found page, I am sorry; the list on the front page has everything that survived. I did not try to set up redirects for every old path. The old site had grown a lot of them, many leading to pages that were themselves just lists of other pages, and recreating that maze would have defeated the purpose.
A few things I learned, in case they help anyone doing the same. Read every post you migrate, all the way through, rather than copying them in bulk; it is the only time you will reread most of them. Decide in advance what you are not going to bring, and write that list down. And keep the feed. A handful of people apparently still read this through a feed reader, which pleases me more than any visitor count ever did.
Comments are off here. The old system received, over its whole life, about a dozen real comments and several thousand that were not. If something here is worth a reply, it is probably worth a note of your own.
That is the move done. The next note will be about something other than the notebook itself.