Reboot Number Six

  • 23rd Mar 2025
    •  • 
  • 2 min read

This is currently the fifth major iteration of this website since 1999, back when the internet was just making it to the mainstream and I first nabbed the domain.

For the last year or so, I’ve been using the Rust-based Zola static site generator and Obsidian mostly on my MacBook Air M1. But I never really took the time to get it it working well on Linux or my newer Macbook Pro, and my beloved RSS has never worked right either, so I’m using this as the excuse to re-evaluate platforms and potentially change up my workflow entirely before automating something I’m not so crazy about.

I’m looking at Quartz instead, which seems like a much better fit. Though the project is relatively young and the community not as big or as active as I’d like to see. Do you know anything about it? If so, I’d love to hear from you!

Here are my goals/constraints:

  1. 100% self-hosted.
  2. Markdown-based, preferably playing nicely within Obsidian’s vault system.
  3. No analytics, cookies, or script bloat. Yucky-patooey! I want privacy-first design with strong security and zero external dependencies, if I can get away with it.
  4. Resistant to scraping or bot harvesting (email addresses, content, links), at least for sensitive content that I do want to share with readers but not the inhuman ones.
  5. Low friction for publishing and experimentation. I like to build new things more than I like to troubleshoot old ones.

Yeah, I’m still somewhat of an oddball in my ideals of what the internet should be. And while I can’t make the internet out there work the way I want, I can at least make my little corner of it here align with my values. I can’t be the only one who’s crazy in this direction. If you know of something else I should be exploring instead, or some other site I can look to for inspiration, please clue me in.