After nearly 20 years paying $20 a month for hosting because I was too lazy to remove old sites and contact clients to see what to do, I finally decided it was time to leave Mediatemple.

Having changed a lot myself I was thinking I might just create a simple minimal site with the old content and let that be the end of it, saving myself $20 a month.

As a front end developer trying to figure out what to use to build this minimal page I figured it might be good to just try some of the technologies I wanted to play with for a while.

Since it is basically impossible to settle on one technology I thought maybe it could be something else.. A (probably soon to be deserted) playground.

So the outline of this project is, try out a bunch of different technologies and somehow weave them into a single application.

To start this off I am trying out TurboRepo. I tried Nx for another prototype at work and really liked it in theory but wanted a point of comparison. I'm not sure I'm settled on TurboRepo right now but for the beginning why not.

The other part of this is, what could a blog/website look like if the goal wasn't consistency but diversity? For that I think it might be interesting to try different tech on the same or similar content.

More concretely I think treating each experiment like a blog post, somthing like literate coding where an experiment can just be something simple like a version of the page with different styles or fonts, maybe some controls for the user to adjust the layout, to more complete blog-like content writing up the experiment and any findings and opinions.

Ultimately I guess it's just a literal home page. A place to put my experiments and experiences. Connecting interests, hypertext like the web was meant to be. My own little slice of the metaverse. I may not be able to upload myself to the cloud but I can create something like it.

Finally I suppose I don't expect this will last long. I'll probably make a couple of simple experiments and then leave it for another 10 years, but maybe it can be something different this time.. lets find out.

James

(During the longest work break in 9 years, I have 3 weeks off!)