A soft launch

I haven't blogged at all since I left Stanford, and thought it was about time to put together a new site to do so. But I felt a bit strange about going back to Wordpress or Drupal, since I don't use CMSes anymore and really haven't in any significant way for years. I also didn't like all the hoops you had to jump through to get interactive data viz to work in those easy-to-use blogs, and was tired of pointing visitors to somewhere else or using iFrames.

I tested out those static site generators like Jekyll but they seemed like too much trouble to fiddle with. So, instead I built this site in React. I've been doing a bit more coding in React lately, and it seemed pretty easy. There's a gulp extension that checks to see what's in my content directory and writes a JSON file that I can use to drive the blog page and another module that processes markdown, which means I just have to write these posts in .md and drop them in a directory and it automatically feeds these into some kind of React blog component to display the full and preview versions.

This site gave me a chance to review and curate some of the work I've been doing over the years, which I've tried to split into essays, code, projects and talks. They come in various sizes, mostly involve D3 or data visualization more generically, and sometimes lack the digital humanities imprimatur that I'd grown so accustomed to having.

I think the biggest challenge going forward is the number of scruffy projects I've got hanging around in the world, like my series on Gestalt in Data Visualization. I'd like to fold that and others into the site more formally, and make the essays less a set of links to outside resources and an integrated interactive piece of the site, as well as produce some blog entries that require more than simple markdown.

We'll see how it all works out.