This blog is ancient, in blog years. The first post was on June 30, 1998, and it featured a randomized emboss for MathMap. Back in those days, it was a mix of neat little snippets like that and interesting links. The site was a single, hand-edited HTML file in reverse chronological order. It ran on a Linux mini-tower built from parts from the MIT Swapfest, and it lived under my desk.

Google hadn’t been incoporated yet. The Internet bubble was still inflating.

Over the years, the tech stack changed: for a while, this site used SGML-based rendering via a custom script (or was it XML?), then it was a nice interactive Typo site with comments, and then eventually it migrated to the current Jekyll architecture. Which seems to be about 12 years old. I’m pretty proud to have kept nearly all the inbound links working for decades now.

Around 2007 or so, I did a fun series of high effort posts about probability monads. But high-effort posts are a trap. Soon I started feeling like every post ought to be high effort. And then I wrote less and less.

But blogs are a bit of a retro endeavour these days. RSS readers still exist, but I imagine nearly all my subscribers have disappeared since the heady days of 2007. And apparently it’s trendy to work with the garage door up.

So maybe it’s time to get back this site’s roots. I don’t have any MathMap snippets for you today, sadly, because the last release seems to have been in 2004. But here’s a cool trick!