A new look, a new domain, a new start
As of late I’ve been on a bit of a writing streak. My coworker Julia Signell and I have written four posts for our company’s blog (which I have mirrored on this site here, here, here, and here), and I have another post awaiting imminent publishing on the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum’s blog. I also have a number of other ideas queued up.
With all of this new content and these new ideas I began to get the itch to resurrect this blog. I never intended for it to peter out as it did. Despite the same intentions now, I’m sure it it will peter out again, but I figure I might as well seize the momentum I have going right now and get some updates out before that inevitably happens again.
The new look
To go with this new start I decided to give the site a new look. I was never satisfied with the previous theme, I just picked something serviceable and tried to focus on writing. I’m super picky about appearance, except I’m not particularly good on the front end side of things, so I can spend a lot of time tweaking formatting and layouts trying to achieve perfection. But that’s generally a waste of time, and I often fail to get it the way I want.
Except nowadays with rise of LLM agentic coding I can actually make things the way I want! A bit of Claude Code, some strong specification and guidance, a fair bit of manual review and tweaking, and voila! I have the theme I always wanted to make.
Well, mostly; I still wish it felt a touch more like plain html with some modernity sprinkled on top, and some things are not quite up to the level of polish I might hope for. I also realize the content of the site can use a boost, like better fleshing out the new about page or making the home page feel more like, well, home. But all in all it I think it is a great theme with the features I need to do cool stuff.
I’m hoping to get a chance to write up some details about the theme development process before it isn’t relevant anymore. We’ll see if that happens.
The new domain
Along with the new look I got a new domain! Way back in the day I ran a blog at a custom domain, and I considered bringing that domain along to this blog when I started it up back in 2020. Except it’s a long domain, and I don’t feel like it really reflects what I want this blog to be. So I didn’t use a custom domain at all, and just left this site at my default github pages URL.
This time around I decided I need to get the domain. I’d been ideating about a domain name for years, and I never came up with anything good. But I finally got there.
Introducing teotl.dev!
Teotl is a Nahuatl word traditionally translated as “god” or something adjacent to that meaning, but modern scholarship suggests that’s an erroneous and overly simplistic representation. I did not choose it to suggest I have any sense of godlike writing abilities or to allude to some sort of holiness or perfection present in my writings. Rather, the choice of teotl is to imply a sense of knowledge bringing order from chaos.
More to come
If nothing else I hope to have some more content mirrored here over the coming months. I also have a lot of presentations coming up this fall, which I hope to be able to document here.
So stay tuned, and let me know what you think of the new look and content.