About

If you've ended up here, then hello!

So what is this site these days? It seems to be a place for me to roughly document whatever personal projects I'm working on at a given point in time. There might be some code tests, build write-ups, some straightforward writing or even some notes on studying Japanese. Right now I'm back looking into sustainability initiatives here in Japan.

That neatly leads to the concept that I'm very much an outdoor person, and for reasons lost to time and tea, for that kind of content, better to have a look at nanikore.net, as that is more focussed on motorcycling, snowboarding, and the outoor stuff these days.

Site related updates are summarised here.

What was Brightblack Classic?

The original brightblack site ran from 1996 to 2008 and for the majority of that was hand coded. I've been looking to restore it in MarkDown along with some 'in hindsight' commentary on the original pages and deploy it again but with that additional context. Let's just say it's in progress and has been for over a decade, but there are a few pages up in the 'Classic' menu at the top there. Some of that content was, and is, almost cringe-worthy in style, including the sheer number of typos which survived so many years and revisions. I will eventually put it all up when it's more human readable.

What does BrightBlack even mean?

The origin of the name 'brightblack' really isn't interesting, though it is rather obscure I'll admit, at least if you didn't grow up in the UK during the 1980s. In 1982 Sinclair Research in the UK released the ZX Spectrum 8-bit computer. Despite the name, it only had 8 standard colours, which could be almost doubled with use of the BASIC 'BRIGHT' command - with the exception of black. Somehow, the idea of BRIGHT BLACK, that mythical 16th. colour, struck me as a nice oxymoron and 15 years later, stuck for a website name, I remembered it. There are plenty of other brightblack sites out there, and I'm curious to know where their name originated.

Why Grav?

When I wasn't rolling my own mark-up, I've often been quite curious about various content management systems, and have tried quite a few to see what works, what doesn't, and how they work, including WordPress, Textpattern, Drupal and others.

After that I also tried out some static site generators such as Pelican, but right now I am playing with this flat file system called 'Grav', partly for this site, but also for using on a friend's website to see how it goes. I actually quite like it, and like many of these things, it works with MarkDown, which is now the best common denominator for many of my historical pages.