Colophon

Posted: 31 October 2019     |     Last modified: 06 July 2023     |     Expires: Indefinite

After many years of blogging, I found that a lot of cruft builds up, where truly useful and archive-worthy posts get buried under outdated and often irrelevant material. Some argue that this archival aspect to blogs is useful for looking back over an author’s history to see how they’ve evolved as a writer, but I find this is mostly beneficial only to the author themselves, and is equally served by simply having an offline backup of past material for personal reference.

This philosophy led me to create this site - a site whose content is ephemeral in nature.¹ That means each new post will expire and disappear after some period of time - it could be days, weeks, maybe longer. Generally, fleeting thoughts like microblog posts will quickly be culled, while more notable thoughts will stick around a bit longer. The idea is to remove material before it’s outdated and no longer relevant, leaving a clean front page and index of material for readers to pursue. This process is more freeing for the author, and I believe more respective of your time as a reader.

Technology

Ephemera Today is hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech. The site is static, and is without extraneous nonsense like JaveScript, ads, trackers, and enormous files - it’s pure HTML and CSS, like the web of yesteryear. The site also has a syndication feed using JSON Feed and RSS, if you prefer to browse the site via supported readers.

The site files are generated via a custom Python script. Script execution is primarily done via Pythonista, though the site can be updated from any device running a recent Python distribution. Code was written in both Pythonista and Sublime Text, and is tracked via Git using Working Copy as the mobile client.