Neelakantan K.K. on the internet

My Plans for this Site

I have extremely vague ideas about what I’m going to do with this site. I am leaning towards publishing something every Friday. That schedule should help me keep at it, and eventually, “organically” figure out what this site will be about. In the end, it might just end up being a bit of everything I said at the beginning. I do have some concrete things I want to do.

I want to set up a deployment pipeline. I’m using a static site generator. I want to figure out how I can just commit to git and have pelican build and push my site automatically. It doesn’t even have to be one of the online services. I might use a shell script. Or maybe a Python script. A Rust CLI tool?! Not a Rust CLI tool. A shell script, I think.
I considered setting up some kind of newsletter-type situation. It should be possible. I’m using an EC2 instance as a server and I have Postgres on it. Pelican does have the ability to add plugins, so maybe I could write a plugin that would take in email IDs, add them to a postgres table and send out the generated article HTML in an email.
- Setting up a mail server would be a bit of a task. It’s not impossible. I’ve done it. It’s just a bit tedious. Although, I don’t need a webmail interface. It’s not going to be a receiving ID.
- That being said, this site has RSS and Atom feeds, so people could just subscribe to them. Bring back RSS!
I want to do the occassional “big” post. I have a couple of post ideas that I could work with. These would involve me needing to research topics and collate information, and do I really want to do that outside of work? Maybe. Of course, I might not research them at all! Maybe it will all be just vibes! About the level of research that Yuval Noah Harari puts into his books, say. I kid. Maybe he puts in a lot of research. But a lot of his output sure seems exceptionally flighty. I tried to read Sapiens and it was not a great experience. It felt like reading the transcript of a really long TED Talk, and I really despise TED Talks. So I will attempt to keep away from sounding like a TED Talk.
I also want to do posts with more structure than these current free-flowing word salads. I envisage these as having sections — with titles! — and arguments, images, tables, what ahve you!
Unrelated to this site, but a general thing I want to try out is, for the next big Indian election, I want to track how vote share/seat share changes with each round of result declaration. I don’t like the ECI’s current way of just having a fucking pie chart. It should be possible to scrape the results as they get declared, feed that into a database, and then display the results as a line graph showing the share (vote or seat) of the various parties. In a constituency, it could be the share (vote or seat) of a candidate. It could actually track it at a constituency level and then aggregate at state and national levels. I have never gotten around to building this. But I think it might be possible for me now.
Actually, maybe not unrelated to this site because I could have a subdomain or a page where I create and host small apps for my own benefit. I have no particular webapp ideas right now, but if I do get an idea, I can always come and note it!

I’m just noting these in a post so that I can revisit these later to see what progress I might have made, or not made, and to track how feasible these might be. I hope this will be an interesting journey. I like the simplicity of this process. Maybe it will help me restart my reading habits.

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