Hello!
To begin with: I think I can divide the people reading this post into two camps:
- You're one of my original Twitter followers and this post is brand new.
- I am somehow famous and you have discovered this post long after it was originally written.
Regardless of when you are reading this, I would like to say welcome!
You might be wondering: what is the point of creating a old-school static blog when you have places like Twitter to vent whatever you want to vent? I have a few reasons:
- Places like Twitter limit the amount of text you can type. I think the current limit is about 240 characters. And yes, while there is the ability to make tweet threads, the way tweets are designed makes creating more long-form content inefficient. Besides, the way the site is designed
- Twitter is notrious for being a mess. I won't go into specifics here, but let's just say it can often be a toxic dumpster fire. It's called a 'hell site' for a reason after all.
- In case you didn't already know, it's getting harder and harder to express LGBT content on traditional social media services these days. Thanks to anti-sex laws in the US and harsh policing from companies like Apple, firms like Discord and more infamously Tumblr have been forced to censor LGBT related tags and content. Twitter could easily follow suit in the near future if trends continue, you never know.
- Twitter is just a bad place to organise your artwork. Finding specific pieces is difficult in the first place because it has no tagging system. Worse, if you use reaction images with friends a lot, it can end up burying your work down even further. Like I said, far from ideal.
I've actually been meaning to create a blog for quite a long time now. It's only until recently that I've been able to put this all together. For this website, I'm using a web framework called Gatsby. In layman's terms, it allows you to create static websites from all kinds of data, like your content servers or in the case of these blog posts, Markdown text. One of the good things about Gatsby is that you can extend the functionality of your site with extra plugins; you'll absolutely be seeing some images in future posts! And perhaps more too...
I know this place is a little bare-bones right now and a little wonky. But I'm sure that, in time, it will be a little cosy place on the internet.