Digging up the Proverbial Roses
I started this site in May 27, 2023 which was probably around the time I got myself out of a deep obsession with Obsidian, and decided to make it a functional-obsession by publishing it on the web (lol). This is also probably around the time I convinced myself traditional blogging “wasn’t for me”, and instead I became enamoured with the concept of digital gardening and wanted to develop an online commonplace book or some shit.1
1 The logic of Past Bec? Unknowable.
It was around this time I migrated from my original site which was using Sphinx and ablog — one of my first (and favourite) esoteric blog configurations where I spent more time learning how to repackage furo so it was compatible with ablog — to something less esoteric like Obsidian and Hugo (see footnote). At this point it’s gone through a few different frameworks and looks — hugo maybe with quartz when it was still a hugo theme, then maybe quartz when it was its own static site, then back to hugo, then onto quarto… since then I seem to have settled nicely into quarto.
It’s two years later, and like I don’t know where the fuck I found the audacity to think I was ever going to actually build and maintain a commonplace book (online of all places) that had like backlinks and shit. I hardly have the time or energy to write normal blog posts let alone ✨link my thinking✨ so this space has been left largely unmaintained.
Despite this, some early notes I wrote while in an ADHD study hole have become some of my most popular! 😳 These popular posts are on the classic and riving topic of: OWASP’s now deprecated CLASP framework… and well that’s it. For some reason it accounts for like 90% of my web traffic? I mean I say that, but my post talking about the relationship-oriented-questioning model has been getting popular recently. 🥸
Despite how fantastic the ✨analytics✨ are when I read over these posts they don’t read like my writing — they read like I’m a multi-national company where union busting is a fun after work activity.
Don’t get me wrong, I spent the like first 4 years of my career in consulting so I seem to naturally write like a multi-national company — but I want to go back to the version of that multi-national company where its normal to watch your coworker go on a Monday afternoon spiral in Slack because they just found out the reason they couldn’t authenticate to the DataDog API was because their PiHole added the DataDog domains to the default block list, where nerd-sniping is considered a team sport and slide decks are equal parts security engineering and arcane ritual.
And I guess this is all just a long winded way of talking about overhauling the content of my blog and clearing out the roses with god damn thorns that always seem to get you no matter how careful you are… and despite the fact they are nice and you get lots of compliments from the neighbours (which is nice), probably need to be cut back, or just like dug up and chipped to make way for something a little less formal and maybe a bit nicer in that way that informal native gardens tend to be… ya know?
Lets be honest though I probably won’t publish anyway, but at least the content will be equally unpopular and I won’t get Google Search Console notification congratulating me on my OWASP CLASP page being the top search result for like the 12th month in a row… fuck thats depressing.