Welcome!

Welcome! If you don’t already know me, I’m Jacob. I’m finishing up my computer science bachelor’s degree and am from Ohio. Here, I’ll write mostly about music, sports, movies, programming / computing, and whatever else pops into my head and is worth writing down.

If you already know me, I finally did it. I finally sat down and built the blog I wanted. After years of barely posting and threatening a blog on social media, I finally did it. Here’s couple reasons why I did it and how.

Why?

Over the past decade, I’ve always been locked into social media. I’m 22, so this means social media has encapsulated almost half my life. I’ve made a couple instagram accounts in my time; one that’s been hacked, my spam (which should be deleted now), the estimeed lol.funnymoment, and my current account. As you can see, its been over 2 years since the last time I posted. This is for a couple reasons.

1. I don’t take a lot of pictures.
2. The pictures I take aren’t typically that great.
3. I don’t do many notable things. (yet!)

So, even though instagram is the social media I use the most, I don’t have much to contribute besides catching up on other people’s business and memes. That made me think, “maybe I should try a more text based social media”. God no. Twitter (not X) is a clown show, and Bluesky doesn’t feel mature enough yet to fill my needs. Also, niether of these support longer posts very well (I don’t yap much, but when I do… its long). Another reason I don’t use Twitter or Bluesky is that any time I post I feel like I’m trying to hard to be funny, or that I’m thinking to hard about how the post will be percieved. I feel like this blog gives me a fully-customizable medium where I can fully be myself and talk about what I want for however long I want, without my yapping being thrust into people’s faces that don’t want to hear it.

Finally, the more “political” answer to why I made this is that I wanted my content to be mine. No matter what social media platform you’re using, the content you post is not yours. It belongs to Facebook, Twitter or whatever other platform you’re using. It lives on their servers, and they decide whether to hide it, change it, or delete it entirely. In an objectively less democratic-seeming US, I want to have more control over my thoughts, media, and methods of expression. Obviously, Google can still decide to not show my site if they wanted, but its easier for alternative search engines like Ecosia, Duckduckgo, and others to still show my site than for 1000s of people to shift to a new social media platform.

How?

I built this blog using a Javascript framework called Astro. There were definately simpler ways of doing this, but there where some key features I wanted in my blog.

1. I want to write my posts in either text files, markdown, or something else simple.

I really did not want to mess with html and making sure my styling is correct for each and every blog post. I just want to write the content and be done with it. Astro generates a static site for me and all of my content is written in MDX, which is essentially just Markdown that I can embed JSX and TSX components into. Another route I could have gone down (and initially was going to) is using something like Django which can template html for me, but using Astro and MDX has felt far cleaner and has less overhead.

2. I want my environment to be fully customizable.

I could use something like Wordpress which would be extremely quick and easy (and I’m extremely comfortable with it, I use it at work!), but in using it before I feel very limited with my customization, both design-wise and on the backend. I also didn’t want to deal with constantly updating plug-ins, PHP and Wordpress versions just to keep things functional and secure. I also hope to eventually host some cool web projects on here as well, so it’ll be much easier to inigrate in my opinion.

Even with little knowledge of the framework before this, it was extremely easy to set up, and they even had a blog template for me to start off with! If anyone else would want to build something similar, send me a message! I highly recommend it.

Moving Forward

From here on out, I hope I can find the time to write to this blog. I’ll be advertising on Instagram when I do decide to post, and hopefully people will read! I’ll still post any interesting happening and photos to Instagram but my main outlet for thoughts and opinions will be here, where I can control it. If you’ve even read all this, thank you! It means a lot to me that you find my perspective interesting enough to read through a small paper, and hopefully you stick around.

P.S.

I coded this site myself! I’m still just a student so if you see any issues or find any bugs, please message me in the contact me form! That goes straight to my email which I check very often, so let me know if theres anything that I can improve on, or if you have any comments / want to discuss anything I talk about.