Design
In the spirit of a blogging framework, I will detail the design choices behind Sculblog in a stream-of-thought prose piece.
Previously I was part of a clothing startup. It was not something I had planned, I just happened to be in the right room at the right time and was invited into it. Someday, I will write a blog post detaling how making clothing for half a year influenced my design taste, but, in one sentence: designing clothing accentuated a strong propensity towards minimalism in my design tastes in the way everything not neccassary had to be taken away to convey a core end-goal design and to accentuate the most important things on the limited space on the human body.
A year later I got into computers and started writing software. And during my software writing journey, I stumbled across so many connnections between clothing design and software design. You might thing the usage of the word "design" for both fields is merely an accident, but no, they were largely in the same domain! Not merely overlapping in semantic ways, in "oh I overlap these words from this field with these words from that field...," but in activating the same brain circutries before I even realized it was happening. This too warrants another blog post, Why the Usage of the Same Word
. Design
is not an Accident in Clothing Design and Software Design
Writing is hard. It is a challange to get all of the ideas out in a nice organized way. That is why in this piece I have mentioned pieces I intend to write, but at time of writing, I have no idea when I will do it. I believe there are so many good ideas, ideas across disciplines, formed by people's unique experiences, in people's minds that would change the world if they got out... The invention of the laser was just a hobby and it led to hard drives... And that is why I have made this program, so people can focus on writing their ideas instead of website management, and thus change the world.
The Sculblog project started when I was making a personal website compiling lots of my previous work including software projects, prose pieces I had written, and visual design pieces. It all started growing in complexity rather quickly, and keeping consistency between multiple HTML files was next to impossible, so it made sense to me to take a bit of time to make a simple framework. PHP and SQLite was the combination that worked best. After the website went up, I found out that there was no website framework that was minimalistic, customizable, and easy-to-use, so, with a little bit more development, I created one! In keeping with my tendancies towards minimalism, I wrote Sculblog to render down to pure HTML. Sculblog is the only blogging framework that renders down to pure HTML while preserving layout consistency across pages.
There is great beauty in pure information. That's what computers do, they process information. Take our messy, imperfect world and turn it into an easily replicatable and preservable format. Computers are perfect. These inventions rest on the backs of so many geniuses... Tim Berners Lee... Aaron Swartz... So many of the greatest minds have put their work in pure HTML, a very pure syntactic format for sharing textual information. Aesthetically, pure HTML calls back to the old internet, when computers and the internet were being pioneered by madmen like John Perry Barlow. These geniuses kept computers on the preservation, processing, and transferring of information, and I believe writing a program that will keep the focus of the internet on that will bring about the best and most transformative ideas for humanity.
Epilogue
These machines we use are brilliant, but not perfect. Sculblog is built on top of pre-existing technologies - HTML, CSS, PHP, SQLite, browsers. There is no one person who knows completely how computers work from top to bottom - or if there are, then they are very, very rare - and I think that is a design flaw in computers. A more ideal mode of information transfer would not be layers on top of layers on top of layers, from bytes to assembly to code to GUIs to browsers. Graphical rendering of textual information by default was a mistake. There will be more worthy means to preserve and protect the flow of information between people, to blur the lines between where one mind begins and another ends... I intend to explore these in future projects of mine.
- D.C.