One of my dreams is writing a book. Alas, apart from my dissertations I never got around to it.
So I thought, maybe just to get started, I might write anything about anything, and just get used to writing regularly. Starting with just articles about what I know.
I used to teach Astronomy. Just some of the mathematical parts like orbits and parallax. So why not start with that? I know it's well trodden ground, but I think it could become a runway for my plane to take off.
One website I quite admire is Atomic Rockets (https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/) by Winchell Chung. It is dedicated to hard science fiction, particularly the science of space travel and colonization.I actually came across it in the late 1990s, and it only had a few pages. I kinda stopped paying attention for some years. Then, on a whim, I decided to look it up again.
Mr Chung had kept working on it, adding more and more pages. It had become a vast, amazing place. What had begun like Bag End had turned into the Great Underground Empire!
Anyway, it's something to aspire to. If I can't publish an actual book, I hope at least to have a vast, sprawling compendium of works. But maybe I'll actually be consistent at writing and have a book.
Maybe something about science. Maybe something about science fiction. Maybe something something something tra lala lala...
14.7.2025
Why not use a blog?
I used to have blogs. Still have them, actually. I just don't write in them anymore. Maybe I'll use them again in conjunction with the static web site.
I think it's because of the way blogs organize the things I write. Reverse chronology: the last entry written is on top. How do I write something when you have to scroll down to find the blog entry containing the Introduction to the topic?
Sometimes I just want to write a thing that's a continuation of another thing, but since I'd been writing about another topic just before, it leads to the article feeling a bit disjointed.
There's no way to organise by topics except by tags.
I guess I'm kind of old fashioned in wanting to organise my writing under topics, with the topical writing following the idea in sequence
Another thing is that I've been doing stuff in VPython GlowScript. Simulations of planetary orbits and other things to do with physics. GlowScript can convert the Python code into JavaScript to be embedded in a webpage.
I'd like to embed them to show the world, but it's very hard to do that on blogs. WordPress wouldn't allow me (at least, I haven't figured out how). And while Blogger does allow me to embed the GlowScript, it messes up the layout, because of clashing stylesheets.
It's easier to use a static page for this purpose, and even that is challenging because the GlowScript is a scarily long block of code. It's easier to do the explanation on a separate page that links to the page with the simulation.
I also use MathJax equations, and it's annoying with blogs. Very troublesome to implement on Blogger. While Wordpress does implement it by default, it's hard to check for errors. You have to post it, then go back to edit to correct it. I've tried doing that with slow WiFi at a hotel once. It wasn't fun.
And last bit not least, I've noticed just how boring web design has become. Everybody's using BootStrap and JQuery! All the big websites now look the same! I still remember when websites looked visually distinct from each other. And the ones using just default HTML tended to be technical or academic, and interesting anyway simply by virtue of their content.
I might not avail myself of the full possibilities of web design, keeping things simple (beyond some CSS for font and padding). But I'd like the option to change how my site looks.
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