Welcome
My name is Tristan. I'm a nerd from the age of Semantic HTML, CSS, and <script> tags.
What's this?
This is my personal web site, where I share some of my thoughts on life, technology, the web, and tidbits of my many hobbies and interests.
Why does it look like this?
Remember the old web? I miss it. There's a certain beauty in well-structured, clear, readable web pages that focus on the content and not just existing as a demonstration of pretty colors and typefaces. This lack of design is really good design in a very real way: it's better for everyone, including me: rather than maintaining a whole bunch of code and scripts, all I have to do to change my web site is make some content and sprinkle it with a few easy markup HTML tags.
I've tried every way of making a web site under the sun, starting with plain HTML in like 1997, then 9-grid table-based resizing fancy image-driven designs in Macromedia Fireworks, to Wordpress blogs with custom themes, to static site generators and server-side custom builds, and finally fancy Javascript-heavy design art pieces that were mostly basic HTML and CSS (but fancy).
I'm tired of thinking so hard about how to make a web site.
It's a web site. It's supposed to be easy, quick to publish, fun, and flexible. I've spent months tweaking the next redesign before ever actually publishing a site. I've made sites I never finished because they were trying too hard to be something they're not.
Whelp. I made this in 45 minutes by hand. And I think it's the best web site I've ever made. Mostly because I know I will actually update it, because it's easy and fun and I don't have to think about it.
Tell me what you think on Mastodon.
Disclaimers: This web site was created entirely by hand (without the aid of LLMs) using plain semantic HTML and minimal CSS. It does not use any Javascript or cookies of any kind (except for gluten free chocolate chip).