Why
Who what when where how
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WHY — Friday 10th Jul ‘26
This website is something I started late last year. I have written at many times in my life, mostly music review and interview things. I love writing. My brain is such a scrambled mess much of the time that writing my thoughts down even in a haphazard way allows me to see them properly.
I write in a notebook, I just get cheap dotted ones from amazon because they’re ring-bound so I can put my pen in the hinge bit and the dots mean I can draw stupid pictures, and generally write in a much more “free” way.
As my notebook is where I do my writing, I figured it would be nice to put up the images of the writing itself instead of typing it up. My thinking at the time was that it would make it more difficult for AI scrapers to get anything out of it. If it’s just an image they can’t trawl by my site and throw my thoughts easily into their next LLM.
However, there are two problems with this. 1) they can just scan the image for the text, computers are good at that now, and more importantly, 2) image only posting is not a nice thing for accessibility.
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Having an open web is something we should all want, and part of an open web to me is a web that is accessible to all. If I only put the images up without any text, people who use screen readers would not be able to get anything out of it.
I don’t know anyone who uses a screen reader but THAT’S NOT THE POINT. If you believe in an open web but your personal site is non-accessible, you’re not really living by the values you hold.
I think more people should have their own websites, but I understand why they don’t. It’s effort and the reach is tiny. and frankly, there’s very few benefits at all. My server was recently hacked by some rando so I lost an afternoon figuring how to reset it all. That wouldn’t happen if I had a substack.
But I don’t WANT a substack. I want to be able to do what I want with my website, my little digital garden as someone (blanking on the name.) once called it.
Anyway, that’s why this site exists in the way it does. I hope you can read my handwriting