Sam Andrews

I fully expect that some content on here will be fluid and change over time. I’ll notice mistakes, prune stuff I consider placeholder, think of better ways to express things, or just generally not really care whether stuff is a carefully preserved archive of my thoughts.

One of the things I like about Obsidian is that it’s as much a glorified note taking app as it is a serious writing tool, and that helps to keep things fungible.

Of course, in the unlikely event I manage to write any actual volume of words, I’m not just going to be going in and tweaking. Sounds too much like hard work.

At some point around then, as I was still figuring out my role online and spending an awful lot of my time offline in dark rooms with loud music, I decided to create a new website. I’m not sure exactly what triggered it (see: dark rooms; loud music), which new ambition or job transition. But it was my resume as a static site.

I am fluent in Adobe Photoshop; Adobe Illustrator; XHTML; Javascript and Macromedia Homesite. I code by hand, and work to the latest XHTML and CSS standards.

I have a solid understanding of Macromedia Shockwave Flash, including Actionscript; Macromedia Fireworks; Quark Xpress; Adobe Page Maker; Adobe InDesign; and the Apache webserver. I am comfortable using PHP and MySQL, including the PHPMyAdmin MySQL managment interface.

It’s interesting to see the technical skills I was at pains to highlight then. Before Macromedia Homesite came along, I wrote all my HTML in Notepad, building entire websites for businesses, bands and friends around my home town. And nearly a decade before that I’d cut my teeth on Quark Xpress doing work experience as a printer in my teens. What a world that opened up for me.

And now I’m back creating a new website. I’m not sure exactly what’s triggered this either, except perhaps I’d like to have a space to sporadically share thoughts that isn’t part of the attention economy.

Back then I crafted simple, static HTML, CSS and Javascript (there was a little text resizing widget!). The site was minimal, perhaps even basic. I don’t think that vibe will change much. But while you, reading this, are seeing static HTML, CSS and Javascript, the technology underpinnings have moved on.

Anything I write, I want to do in Obsidian. While I’m not deep into all the nerdy corners of it, as a writing tool it seems to be sticking, and I’ve always liked the Markdown format. So the ambition is just to write there, and have it appear here.

To do this, I’m on a journey to integrate Obsidian’s Markdown documents directly into Astro, which creates my static site and will deploy to Vercel whenever I push changes to a repo on GitHub. I’m going to design, code, tweak, write, and deploy all the while I’m working this stuff out, so whatever’s online is a bit of a live experiment.

Let’s see where it ends up.