About
Hi, my name is Nick Wilson and I am not a robot, I just have a lot of trouble identifying what things are and aren't motorcycles in photographs on the internet.
I decided to create a new personal website after twenty years of false starts and not really having one since 2004. I didn't really want a blog, and I didn't really want to run my own server anymore. (I do that all day at work.) While searching for alternatives I stumbled across something I had tried to do several times but always either didn't have the time, or lost interest, or ran into technical hurdles that caused me to have to revisit my strategy. I was already using Obsidian as a semi-ubiquitous capture location. It uses simple markdown files and can sync across all my devices. While reading about an implementation someone had created of a gopher-like web implementation called Gemini I stumbled across 'digital gardens'. Essentially somewhere between a 1990's personal page on the web, a blog, a personal wiki, and a MySpace page. Functionally, it was what I was looking for, a series of markdown text files that get generated into a site. More importantly though,