Every few years I rebuild my personal site. The overaching goal remains constant: to be able to write in a way that integrate pictures with words, and let readers interact with the claims therein.

Why?

From about 2004--2016 my personal sites had been on Wordpress. I think Wordpress is great; most of my business websites still run on Wordpress. However, letting readers interacting with the material is definitely not in the cards.

The itch to make interactive material is too great, particularly to supplement teaching. I ended up learning Vue, and re-wrote the site in VuePress. I loved MDX, and material written with this came in very handy during the covid online / hybrid / blended period.

It also acutely exposes the shortcomings: there is a wide chasm between client-interactive static site, and any server-sided operations. A chasm filled with weird javascript frameworks and libraries and bundlers that breaks when you look at them the wrong way, and breaks when you don't look at them at all.

2022 for us was a year of trauma and re-invention. One of these re-invention is picking up Elixir as my primary language. Elixir has essentially one web framework, Phoenix / LiveView, and I figure that if I were to be any good, I've got to have something in production with it. Hence this site.

The promise here is (eventual) reader-material interactivity, interactivity of the deeper kind queries resource from databases and computes on server. (The first of there would be the LiveView-enabled articles on Cantonese.) There is also (maybe)reader-reader interactivity in the future.

It's all a little messy right now, but the future is worth a little mess of now.