cesque⏵monolith

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monolith-ii

Monolith is my new blog/wiki/knowledge base/thought-dump, built using Ghost as a headless CMS and Next.JS as a static site generator. My goal with Monolith was firstly to work out how to set up a static site generator/CMS combo, and secondly to start having a place online to put information about the thing I am working on and/or thinking about, and hopefully also encourage myself to write some more longform content about the aforementioned.

One of my biggest inspirations for starting Monolith is Devine Lu Linvega's wiki, hosted at xxiivv.com. It's a really fascinating site, and one where every new page reveals some new act of creation, often built on other such creations. I'm trying to capture some of that creative energy here. The wiki itself was redesigned sometime in the past; the previous version exists on the Internet Archive too – both versions were influential in my reasoning behind making this site and also the writing of the site itself.

That said, I promise I didn't crib the design philosophy whole cloth from xxiivv.com: I love the idea of super minimalist, even brutalist web design, and already employed it in the design of my tarot card site, hierophant.app. The monochromatic colour scheme in Monolith is an extension of my 3-colour themes for hierophant.app (and I had to exercise a great amount of self-control not adding colour palettes to Monolith also).

Another key element of the 'spirit' of Monolith is the non-adherence to the concept of the 'blog', even though Ghost is primarily designed for that purpose. Instead I plan to treat it as a loosely connected set of pages, where some may have some thread connecting them and some may be isolated. In doing this, I hope to build a site where the experience of browsing is comparable to the experience of perusing a charity shop or a second-hand bookshop, where you're not quite sure what you might find. This is also the reason for not showing full post titles on the index page. It also helps me not feel the pressure of knowing that someone might read what I write.

I want to add pages for my personal projects, including hierophant.app and some other small things which are already on my GitHub page. Along those, I can also start taking smaller snippets of code, music, whatever else I am working on and put them somewhere "real" instead of them disappearing onto my hard drive.

Other topics which I can write about include:

It would also be cool to start writing again – something for which I used to have a passion, but haven't tried in a few years.