Colophon

I started building websites for fun in the mid 90s when I was a teenager, producing artisanal, hand-written HTML in Notepad.exe. I think I learned, mostly, by viewing the source of other websites, which was actually readable back then, so if you saw something cool you could see how it worked and steal be inspired by it. After that, I'd FTP everything up to my ISP over my external 28.8k Modem Blaster (Creative Labs, makers of the Sound Blaster audio cards also made these!) and all that was left to do was sit back and refresh to watch your hit counter go up while the rest of the animated gifs and midi file loaded.

In the years between those heady days and now I guess I didn't have much time for fiddling around like that online. I was lucky enough to work in some places that had strong internal blogging cultures though, where writing was the primary way to share ideas and get things done.

In 2025 I decided to slack off take a sabbatical, so I had some time on my hands and nowhere else to write. I dusted off one of the many unused domains and set up an old school blog.

After a while it adopted the name (and another unused domain 🤦‍♂️) nomass. A name rearrangement and meant as a description of what I thought I'd write about. Originally I bought the name for a blog just about VR Spatial Computing but I realised that a broad mix of software, AR, VR, AI, it's all part of the digital world we seem to be creating that is in a sense real, even if not physically so. Bits, not atoms, as people like to say these days. It was also, I realised, a good description of what I was trying to make. A simple, lightweight site with no framework, no client-side JavaScript, no tracking, no cookie banner, no newsletter dickover.

So most of the content is something to do with that list above, although really just whatever I'm tinkering with or interested in at the time. I'm trying to keep my standards low and just play.

How it's made

I started out how I started out, back to hand-written¹ HTML and CSS. I sort of had this idea for a long time that the hypertext markup language was, after all, made for exactly this, and a perfectly simple tool for the job.

But over the course of a few months I learned first hand why John Gruber invented Markdown. It's not hard to write HTML, but it's fiddly and it either interrupts your flow or is a pain to come back and add when you're done.

So now, I write each post as a Markdown file with two lines of front matter then run everything through a little build step. I do realise I should probably just use Astro or something like that, but my needs are simple and I like that it's still all my own code except for kramdown, a Markdown library.

I guess my philosophy changed a little and what I want now is to have as little friction as I can to actually writing more often.

It's hosted on Cloudflare Pages and deploys with a git push. The only server-side code is a single function that receives webmentions.

I wanted the RSS feed to read the same as the page. RSS 2.0 says that entity-encoded HTML is allowed but without a list of permitted elements and every reader implements its own, so I use a minimal set of HTML tags that I hope they all support, and convert relative URLs to absolute, as the RSS Best Practices Profile recommends. Otherwise it should be the same as a page on the web, and seems to work. If you read via RSS and find something broken, please let me know.

Posts

Over time I've noticed posts come in three kinds: notes (short, most of them), quotes (someone else's words, with a little of mine) and essays (longer). I used to show what each post was and let you filter, but it didn't seem that useful so some mass was removed.

Indieweb

The site is marked up with microformats, receives webmentions, publishes its blogroll as OPML, and assumes the RSS feed is the main way people read, like it's 2003.

Contact

You can subscribe or email me.

1. Mostly. I used Claude Code when building the chrome of the site and to get all the microformats correct, but the posts I did by hand. ↩