This is Mistakes Were Made, Molly Howell’s personal blog-shaped object. There is no theme to be found here; you will encounter posts about whatever I am interested in at the moment. I’m not exactly aiming for a big Hacker News following, and I don’t run any analytics or comments systems, so I wouldn’t know if I got one anyway. All it is is my space to say whatever I want to put out there.

Technical Info/Hot Takes

This blog is entirely static HTML and CSS. I don’t have strong feelings about the web at large being usable without scripting; I think that ship has sailed, established a colony, and had its materials recycled into a lovely row of houses. But I do believe in using only what you need, and for this blog I don’t need any client-side code that isn’t already in the browser, so I don’t have any. I also don’t need to have any kind of ads, trackers, or other monetization, so I don’t.

The blog pages here are all generated by Jekyll, which I chose largely because of how clean its output is by default. I’m using the default Jekyll theme, Minima, but I’ve changed all the colors to make my own dark mode and altered a few other layout aspects I didn’t like, and I also added Bitbucket to the list of links available in the footer. CI and hosting are handled wonderfully by ZEIT Now.

The source code for the entire site, including this blog and all of its aforementioned theme customizations, lives in this Bitbucket repo. The site used to be on GitHub, but the way GitHub is eating the world bothers me and I wanted to stop helping them do that in the tiny little way that I was, so I do everything on Bitbucket now. It’s fine.

License

This blog and its posts are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Comments

There is no comments system here, and I will not be adding one. There’s no technical reason behind that decision, I just think maintaining a comments section is massively more trouble than it’s worth; they’re magnets for spam of course, but even if you can find a way around that, the signal-to-noise ratio is still awful. If you do feel an uncontrollable need to tell me how you feel, perhaps because I am Wrong On The Internet™, please follow this simple procedure:

  1. Stop.
  2. You’re not helping anything or anyone.
  3. Seriously, please just don’t.
  4. Use Twitter.

Thank you for your cooperation.