For years I lovingly hand-coded my personal website. The ethos was pure, the product normcore: a single page, packed with links to my academic papers and other projects, all lightly seasoned with a sprinkle of explanatory text.

I scoffed at the polished and capacious WordPress sites of my colleagues. “A navbar? With four sections?? Does that link to a PDF of your CV really need a whole page to itself?”

I also scoffed at colleagues with personal blogs featuring mostly tumbleweeds, and the occasional, stray comment from some ill-informed passerby.

But then I discovered static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll. I can’t resist a shiny new tech-toy, especially when I have no real use for it. I’d always kind of envied my tumbleweed blogging colleagues anyway—they had a place to think out loud, to jot down ideas, and to escape the confines of formal academic writing. And even if Prof. WordPress’s site had all the heart and soul of an Ikea display, it still looked better than my homespun design.

So it was only a matter of time until I caved. I installed Hugo and created an unnecessarily complex new site, complete with blog and tumbleweeds. (No comments section, though.) I’m hoping it’ll motivate me to create worthy content to furnish it post hoc.

But for today self-indulgence is the watchword. So this inaugural post just issues some promissory notes: here are some topics and posts in the pipeline. (Because if I promise it in public then I actually have to deliver, right?)

• Ideas about the future of academic journals, especially in my field, philosophy.
• Adventures in amateur data science. My new favourite toy is R, and I’ve been using it to explore the data collected by Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy. I’ll be posting fun facts and findings from that project.
• Accuracy for Dummies: tutorials and ideas about the accuracy framework in formal epistemology, as I work through Richard Pettigrew’s excellent new book.
• Assorted nerdery: hacks, tips, and hot-takes from my inept fumblings with my technological toys of choice.
• Pop philosophy on sundry topics: objectivity, politics, probability and statistics, food… whatever I can plausibly fake some expertise on with enough caffeine.

If you’re the sort of bizarre creature who might be interested in this particular slurry, you can subscribe to the RSS feed. But I can’t recommend it.