Ah, the good old world wide web ! The open web !
I missed writing. I wanted to share thoughts, ideas, essays and projects for far\ntoo long — probably years !
Authoring is a crucial skill to me, for both work and personal expression. It’s\na consuming exercise, sometimes emotional and introspective, but deeply human\nand always reflective.
The journey of crafting a coherent piece of text is simply highly underrated.\nNow that AI and large language models are disrupting everything, I’ve come to\nvalue the exercise of writing more than ever.
These days, we “humans” aimlessly scroll through feeds of mindless rants and\nvisuals of all sorts, mostly posted by reaction-seekers. Too often, I found\nmyself in dismay and at a loss in my experience with social networks — somehow\nunable to do more than consume, “retweet”, or fall into the trap of ranting.
Now I have the urge to rediscover the pleasure of expressing myself, sharing and\ncrafting with thought and intent in a non-toxic space.
\nThe best format will always be the one we shape to match our purest\nexpression.
\nThe best space will always be safe and open.
\nOwn both, or your expression will be framed into someone else space, under\nsomeone else rules.
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In this personal space, where I’ll freely and openly share my thoughts, I wanted\nto start afresh — on a website under my control.
No platforms, no social networks, no excessive tools. Screw those\ncentralized-gate-keepers-algo-manipulators ! Just good old web\nstandards and a few effective lines of code.
Recently, Deno and its 🍋 Fresh\nframework caught my interest; I could say more about why and probably will in\nthe future — but for this post, what matters is that my quest for a new personal\nwebsite gave me the perfect pretext to explore this new stack.
As a result, I also started a Blog plugin for Fresh\nhttp://github.com/nrako/fresh_blog_plugin. ⚠️ It’s a work in progress\n🚧 ! And yes, there are other Fresh blog plugins, but none that make use\nof MyST.
MyST (Markedly Structured Text) is another brilliant and\nnoteworthy open source project. It’s basically a superset of markdown\n(CommonMark) for technical and scientific authoring. The MyST project offers\nmuch more, but what really caught my attention is its parser and HTML\ntransformers for this markdown flavor.
MyST is great for technical writers, coders, and more, but I believe that the\nscientific and academic rigor it enables can also benefit many web publications\n— especially when it comes to referencing and citing other works and authors.
Additionally, I have some ideas I’d like to experiment with, particularly around\npublications, sharing, and reactions. For that I need to fully control the space\nand code.
For now, and at the time of this first post, my MyST integration is very crude,\nand I simply dumped some logic from my WIP 🚧 plugin directly into my website’s\nsource. This was necessary because I wanted to experiment with the bleeding edge\nof what Deno has to offer; though I encountered a few temporary issues. JSR does\nnot yet love JSX (.tsx files) 1 and Fresh v2 is still in alpha and\nwill have significant changes to its plugin interface 2. But as\nsoon as things gets more stable, I’ll make sure to release my little plugin and\nmake use of it here on my website.
—my little safe space on the Web.
JSR issue for publishing JSX/TSX files\nhttps://github.com/jsr-io/jsr/issues/24 ↩
\nRoadmap to Fresh v2\nhttps://github.com/denoland/fresh/issues/2363 ↩
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