My first post

It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve finally got my weblog up—I have a pretty bad habit of letting perfect be the enemy of good. I’m using the Astro static-site generator, which I haven’t used before, so I’m learning as I go. For the design of the blog, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from the websites at the Web Design Museum.

My plans so far are to: (1) upload a crossword I’ve been working on and (2) write about some of the interesting things I’ve read about on the translation and reception of Marx’s Capital in Russian. Other than that, I expect to only post occasionally, when I find something worthwhile to write about.

As far as I can tell, I think I’ve done a pretty good job in making sure that everything I’ve coded won’t break in the future. More than anywhere else on the site, I’ve tried to code the pages here to be resilient, instead of going for the first thing that ends up working. Since the code I write for my blog will end up being used on a lot of pages, I don’t want to use band-aid solutions or end up losing track of my codebase.

I haven’t set up my comments widget yet, so if anyone else has used Astro and has any advice, it would be nice if you could let me know in the guestbook.

Some things I still need to do: (1) figure out what the best way is to format academic citations in Astro, (2) integrate the comments widget from the guestbook into the blog, (3) merge Astro’s blog RSS feed with my main RSS feed, (4) figure out the best way to format images without layout shifts, (5) decide on what fonts I want to use for the body of the blog, among others.

I guess I have got a lot of work ahead of me… @.@