This will be my first daily entry put directly onto my own site, rather than emailed to a friend. With that in mind, I should introduce this new site I have.

• I designed this site for simplicity rather than complexity. Simplicity is considered a virtue in most schools of design, yet web design is often dominated by visual complexity. This is less rampant than it used to be, probably due to the popularity of mobile browsing, but it is still noticable. Most websites try to make you feel like they are very large, like you could spend a long time wandering around inside them and get lost. They give you many places to look for navigation links, and the links aren't very distinct from the content. I prefer my websites to be simple and easy to navigate. You should be able to get a feel for what kind and amount of content is on the site, because to appear like there is more or less than there really is only leads to disappointment in the long run. Exploration should be easy and fun, and to that end, all my navigation links are grouped in one area and are brightly colored. Don't they just make you want to click them? There aren't many of them yet, since this site is still young, but eventually there'll be other things, like RSS, tags, and a downloads section.
• In general, I prioritize readability over prettiness. This is why my colorscheme is (almost) white-on-black. Black-on-white is more traditional and more professional-looking, but white-on-black is often easier on the eyes, particularly late at night or if your eyes are tired. Also it's nerdier. Grey-on-anything is bad.
• Where readability does not suffer for it, prettiness is good. I like green things, and natural colors in general. My sense of aesthetics tends to appreciate things that are fairly plain, but with a touch of art. This is reflected in the subtle color tints and the arrangement of page items. Since this site was only created last weekend, it's rather more toward the plain side, and some of the alignments of things might be a little awkward. I'll smooth these things out over time, and maybe add a couple small embellishments.
• Responsive layout is a good thing. Sites should look good on all devices, screen sizes, and zoom levels; even better if it looks consistent in all cases. Sites about programming in particular have trouble with small screens or large zoom levels, since sometimes a block of code has a long line or two which shouldn't be wrapped. Different websites react to this differently. Many just ignorantly cut off the side of the code. Some allow horizontal scrolling within the code block itself, which is workable but awkward. The best solution, if your layout allows it, is to let code blocks cause global horizontal scrollability. Horizontal scrolling may be bad but local scrolling is worse.
• This site is all plain HTML with no dynamic elements. It's compiled with a small system consisting of a make.pl build system, an Embedded Perl templating system mimicing Embedded Ruby, and hand-written html. There is no Javascript and one CSS file, so it loads really fast. This setup was partly inspired by Programming in the 21st Century.

Basically, I just want this to be a nice homeish-feeling homepage. You know, like people used to have, before all these social networks and user-generated-content mega-sites. Those big global sites are nice and all, but they don't belong to you. This website belongs to me.