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I’m Chris Nicoll. I’m not the only one, but I’m the one that’s…me. Now that I’ve cleared that up:

I make notes at this site for the benefit of my later self or for anyone else who happens across it in a search for a missing piece of information.

When I’m trying a new project, I often find my initial points of confusion rapidly feel trivial, so here I’m trying to note them along with useful references before I don’t see the point.

I have a tendency to play with with my website themes and templates, and so this site itself (currently a static site built using Hugo) is likely to remain a work in progress.

Much of what I like about Hugo is the simplicity of working with plain text files. If I want to restore, edit, or repurpose any blog post, I already have human-readable copies of both the HTML files and the Markdown files they’re generated from. There’s no database. Of course, simplicity means different things from different angles.

For personal notes and random fragments, TiddlyWiki is my no-nonsense capture system. It’s also a web page, but I use it as a local file. It’s trivial to dump information into it, but it also allows infinite possibilities for organizing and structuring content. It’s searchable, and it’s also readable in a text editor, should the unthinkable happen and its JavaScript become corrupt or unsupported (this has never happened to me in (well) over a decade of use and upgrades).

The theme of this site started out as a clone of the very minimal XMin theme by Yihui Xie. XMin gave me a clean starting point from which to add what I want. It quickly became…a bit more messy. The CSS is hand-coded, and is very disorganized.

The sidebar/header menu template is based on the Learn theme by Mathieu Cornic.

The tag cloud uses code by Artem Sidorenko, who credits Henrik Sommerfeld.