A corner of the internet that is actually mine

Most of what I have put online over the years lives somewhere I do not control.

That is not a complaint about any particular platform. They are useful, and I still use them. It is just a fact about the arrangement: the format is theirs, the layout is theirs, the ordering is theirs, and the thing can change or disappear without asking me. Anything I write there is really a guest.

RESON is the version where I am not a guest.

What I actually wanted

Not a portfolio. Portfolios are a specific shape, and that shape only fits the professional part of a person. I wanted somewhere the work and the rest of it could sit together without one of them having to pretend to be the other.

So there is Work, which is meant to be credible enough to hand to an employer. There is Writing. There is Explore, which is a map of the things I am interested in. They are all the same site because they are all the same person.

The part that makes it durable

Everything here is a Markdown or JSON file in a folder. This piece is a text file. The projects are text files. The topics are a JSON array.

That sounds like a small detail and I think it is the most important decision in the whole thing. It means the content is not trapped in a database or a proprietary export format. If every tool I currently use disappeared, the writing would still be sitting there in plain text, readable by anything, and I could rebuild the site around it in a weekend.

A Python script turns those files into the pages you are reading. The script uses nothing but the standard library, so there is no dependency tree to rot and nothing to reinstall before it will run in five years. The output is ordinary static files.

Why it is deliberately boring

There is no framework here, no database, no content system, no analytics, no tracking, no cookie banner, and no third-party script running while you read this.

Some of that is a privacy preference. Most of it is that I could not identify a problem those things would solve for me. A personal site is text and pictures. That problem was solved a long time ago.

The slow part

The honest thing to say is that most of this site is still empty. There are rooms in Explore with a description and nothing behind them yet.

I would rather that than fill them with something invented. The whole point of having a permanent place is that it can accumulate. Things get added when they are real, and in ten years the archive is either interesting because I actually lived and made things, or it is not, and no amount of design will have covered the difference.

I own the domain and I own the files. That was the entire requirement.