Improved Means for Achieving Deteriorated Ends


Colophon

Construction

This website was lovingly built by hand using collards.

It is hosted on a Linode VPS (which Akamai has not yet ruined) as it has been for over 15 years. The source code is available on sourcehut.

Previous versions of this site were built with coleslaw and, many years ago, Wordpress.

There is an RSS feed available if you'd like to subscribe.

Attribution

Styling is a mishmash of Tufte and inspiration from badd10de and thomasorus

Fonts are ET Book and Fira Mono

Inspiration

I often think of my favorite poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote in Ars Poetica:

I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies.

Since the development of this site and collards are deeply intertwined, it is difficult to separate the site generators that influenced collards from the authors and sites that influenced kingcons.io. Even a program as simple as a static site generator begets a world of variation.

From the world of scheme, I was inspired by Andy Wingo's tekuti partially because of my admiration for Andy but also because of his clarity around the whys of his design and the choice to use git as a backing store.

David Thompson's Haunt hews much closer to my aims for Collards and the CLI interface was a direct inspiration for what I wound up producing.

Max Rottenkolber's geneva was very interesting to me because of how seriously it took document generation as a problem and I loved the way his site offers Text, PDF, Source, and Changes links for all generated pages. While I don't aspire to directly provide PDF or Plaintext renditions of my pages, the Source File and Log links at the top of every post and page are in honor of his example. Collards may generate them directly one day rather than linking to a git forge.

Finally, I was delighted by ~pyramidion's crystal. I don't remember how I ran across it now (the common lisp reddit perhaps) but it is small, simple, and direct. I wanted more abstraction and flexibility than it provides but it reminded me that I could start small and that having tools that drive you to write is probably the only important thing in the end.