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October 2020 - 10 February 2023
What sort of writing could you create if you worked on it (be it ever so rarely) for the next 60 years? What could you do if you started now? -- Gwern Branwen
Early in 2021, turned thirty. There is a decent chance I'll be around still in 2081. The actuarial tables imply a 19% chance for me, but that's assuming death rates stay exactly where they are in coming decades, rather than falling as they have through most of history. In any case, even if I don't have sixty years left in me, the 50% odds give me another 48 years -- till about 2068. I've been writing things, off and on, since about the sixth grade, and even though I have no ambitions to be a writer I do occasionally produce something I'd like to keep around.
This website is a place to keep things I intend to have around and visible long-term. Taking a cue from Gwern, I'm trying to build the set of files that make up the site in a manner that makes them most likely to continue being useful throughout my lifetime. On the technical side, that means I'm writing them in Markdown, a format which I think is around to stay.
I keep the collection of pages that make up this website in the program obsidian, which makes it very easy to maintain an interlinked collection of Markdown files that evolve over time. Whenever I want to publish the current state of my site, I first use a tool called obsidian-export to get the formatting of the files just right -- I'm writing in the "Obsidian" flavor of Markdown; obsidian-export converts this to the "CommonMark" flavor. I want it compatible with the CommonMark specification because this is the specification that Hugo works with. Hugo is a program that takes my collection of notes and builds a collection of web pages out of it. This whole process was a bit complicated to set up and tweak, but building the whole website from my notes takes about two minutes. Then I dump the remainder into an Amazon S3 bucket which presents this website to the public.
In the long run, I think, as long as I have the Markdown files, I can always use some other set of tools later. Markdown to HTML conversion is a problem with multiple solutions, so this system is unlikely to have major problems with software compatibility down the road. I'm not keeping this stuff in a Wordpress database or anything. Even in the unlikely event that every software tool specifically designed for working with Markdown were to disappear, the markdown files themselves are human-readable.
Along the same lines, I'm building this as a static site, out of HTML and images. In the short run, using something like Latex via Javascript to render equations or similar things might seem convenient, but images aren't going away. Software comes and goes, but text and images are more durable.
I once tracked all file changes on GitHub. I am no longer doing so. It adds effort, and I figure I'll write more if I spend less time messing about with technical things.
My goal is for each page to have a content license at the bottom so that no one will ever have any doubts about their right to copy or host the content. Perhaps the site will get copied and last after I'm gone -- perhaps somewhere there will remain an archived copy and, long from now, maybe someone will stumble across it and find something interesting.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.