Symbolic Forest

Regular readers—or, at least, people who have looked at this site before the last month or two—might remember that it used to have a discreet cookie consent banner at the top of the page, asking if you consented to me planting a tracking cookie that I promised not to send to anyone else. It would pop up again about once a year, just to make sure you hadn’t changed your mind. If you clicked yes, you appeared on my Google Analytics dashboard. If you clicked no, you didn’t.

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Keyword noise: blogging, search requests, indie, Indieweb.

When I rewrote and “relaunched” this site, back in 2020, I very consciously chose to stay simple. I didn’t want to tie myself to one of the major “content platforms”, because over the years too many of them have closed down on barely more than a whim. I didn’t want a complex system that would be high-maintenance in return for more functionality. I didn’t want to have to moderate what other people might want to say in my space. More importantly, though, I did want a space more like the online spaces I inhabited 20 or so years ago; or at least, like the online spaces of my imagination, where people would create in their own little corner not worrying about influence or monetisation or that sort of thing. It’s possible that place never really existed, except in my mind, but it was something I always aspired towards, and it was a place where I met a whole load of other people who shared a similar outlook on why they were writing down so much stuff out there on the internet for other people to read. That was why, when I rewrote this site, I kept it simple, and produced a static site that could be hosted almost anywhere, with source code that can be put into any private Git hosting service. I didn’t even go for one of the mainstream static site generators; I chose a relatively simple and straightforward open-source one that works by gluing a number of other open-source tools together to output HTML. It’s about as plain and independent as you can get.

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Keyword noise: Indieweb, independence.