Why… are we here?

Oof. Well where to begin. I always find blogging to be such a strange experience. Writing in general should kind of have a point, a thesis, a something. Meandering prose doesn’t really benefit anyone.

But I’m also starting this blog here so it has to at least try to talk about the experience of the site, and testing out my markdown blogging setup. It’s just markdown files that statically render at build time. I think it’s pretty neat, and works without a CMS.

Lets be up front with each other, this is a portfolio site as of right this second. It’s for my resume. It’s to try to make myself look good. So now that is out of the way and we’re all on the same page:

What is the goal?

Well, mostly this site is to build something that I can develop over time as my portfolio site, link to other projects, have a blog like this one, probably eventually get photography collection up here. I think that we’ve lost something on the internet due to people not producing content anymore, people just consume content. I’m not sure anyone wants to read what I have to say, but I like doing it, and this is my website, so I can do what I want.

Currently working on

But at the moment the thing I’m working on as a personal project is bardbase, my attempt at organizing data in a way that I’m not quite sure has been done before.

Essentially it’s taking the Schmidt shakespeare lexicon, and several open source Shakespeare texts to create an easy to access collection of texts and references in a high performance highly available site, this is achieved using Cloudflare D1 and Sveltekit to handle static site generation and minimal api routes for things like search.

All of Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, poems, and thousands of references to the texts, all from open licensing sources. The licensing makes it easy to build out without worry of reprisal and working in a massive environment with lots of little challenges to overcome. i.e. old english has weird quirks in writing like vv being written in place of w, older forms of spellings, inconsistent spellings. How do you correlate that to modern textual references? how do you align the data in a way that is not only coherent, but helpful?

I’m not sure I have all of the answers to those questions yet, but I’m working on it.