Today's task was supposed to be adding some basic CSS to these pages, but I got distracted by a Rust exercise I've been working on. Lost track of time.
It was once of the first times debugging felt natural in Rust though! I knew where to look in my own code for mistakes, to at least make some progress on the issue. I didn't complete the exercise, but it felt good to move forward mostly on my own (I referenced the example code heavily; in the past, that hasn't been enough to get me unstuck).
Where I think I left off: ThreadPool creates a vector of Worker objects which should be iterated over during thread processing. It seems like the program is only looking at one worker, not really accomplishing the goal of multi-threading. I think it might have something to do with my understanding of the syntax-- now that I'm looking at my code again, I don't think I set up the loop correctly in impl Worker.
I'm still trying to really wrap my head around and conceptualize what a digital garden is.
As mentioned in "A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden", they're supposed to act as free-form, in progress wikis. Most of us are more accustomed to a 'blog' style of website with posts in reverse-chronological order, if not a social media feed and it's dreaded "algorithm."
So this opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of navigation as well as content. My first instinct was obviously to build a 'blog' page of journal entries in reverse chronological order. Maybe that isn't a bad thing! Even my chaotic, lower effort, irl garden often contains rows of corn. A miniature version of the monoculture you'd see just outside of my birthplace in Kansas.
It would be cool to build pages for all of the things I'm too anxious to put on LinkedIn, or showcase projects linked to my GitHub. I also don't think I'll limit these efforts to code and my professional skills; life is too short.
I've tried to start a digital garden at least twice before, so why am I changing platforms/approaches again? There are a few reasons.
The main thing is that I personally keep coming back to this nostalgia for the old web; I miss the days of true customization and exploration as the default experience of the internet. A few days ago, tumblr rolled out an update that makes their UI very similar to 2023 twitter; in nearly the same breath, they clutter my notifications box with tongue-and-cheek messages about how many posts I viewed in one day, attempting to make fun of the latter site. Frankly, I find it all extremely annoying at best. I joke sometimes that web 2.0 was a mistake, but the current homogeny of the web was absolutely intentional and an attempt to sell something that should be a free and public utility.
Secondly, I have a good friend who is just starting to dip their toe into web development. We're starting to pair-program with HTML and CSS for their foundation, and Neocities felt like a good space to explore these concepts. Why not brush up on my skills at the same time?
Neocities, as a platform, might reduce the friction of building a personal site just enough for me to actually keep up with it. My last digital garden was built in VS Code and deployment was a challenge, if only in the realm of decision-making. Maybe someday I'll have more of a hand in that process, but for now, I'm narrowing my focus and working on consistent creativity. We'll see where this goes!