Scott Knight's Blog

Back to Basics

Scott Knight — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:03:42 -0600

Site updates

I’ve decided to further consolidate and simplify some of the functionality as I continue to centralize my web presence. I don’t really post on social media, and as of late I am greatly cutting back my media consumption and replacing it with reading long-form texts. Here are some of the ways I’m doing this:

I’m removing the email subscription functionality from this site. My apologies if this is how you prefer to consume my posts. As an alternative, please consider bookmarking the site or using an RSS reader (I recommend NetNewsWire). Better yet—if you find something interesting here, please feel free to use the ‘Reply via Email’ button below to get in touch. My inbox is always open for interesting conversations.
I’m deactivating my Mastodon account. My original intention was to automate post distribution to it from this site, but there’s really no need for that when RSS is available. Anything I would post there, or any social media site for that matter, I would post here anyway.

Life update

The observant reader will have realized that I haven’t published anything here since last June. And this is not for any particular reason other than a redirection of focus.

Replacing short-form online content—which is almost invariably negative—with reading actual books and thoughtful long-form online content is better for the mind and general wellbeing. So, my to-be-read list has grown significantly and I’m spending more time with classics in philosophy and theology, among other topics I find to be enlightening and enriching.

Aside from that, I’ve invested in a second home in Texas and am currently working to renovate the house there. As I’m sure you can imagine, this takes up most of the rest of my time lately. It will be a nice retreat once the current work is done, so I hope to share more on that later.

The takeaway is that you should never be afraid to experiment with life, take risks, and change things up every so often. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Life is a journey, not a destination.”

Happy Holidays

Scott Knight — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 12:51:46 -0600

You may have noticed it’s been quiet around here lately. No, the site’s not abandoned and I haven’t neglected to keep writing here; I’m just taking a break to enjoy the holiday season with family and friends.

I’ll be back to posting in 2024 with some new writings and whatever else I find worth discussing here.

So whatever your faith, practice, tradition, culture, or custom, I hope you make time to enjoy some earned rest and have a happy holiday season.

A Matter of Structural Preference

Scott Knight — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 16:48:47 -0500

Update: After some polling, I decided to make these changes. Also added a Links page to the main navigation with a sitemap.

I whipped up this site a while back with a few main goals in mind:

Establish a place on the web to publish my thoughts, useful/interesting bits of info I encounter, and generally POSSE my content on the internet to break out of social media silos (check)
Learn a new platform to keep my web development skills from getting rusty (check)
Put out content that might be useful or interesting to other folks (check, hopefully)

My original design here has featured what would normally function as an “About” page as my actual Home page. Though, my thinking lately is that it may benefit readers to make my posts more easily accessible, since this is a main function of the site.

This change would require moving my Home page to an About page, which wouldn’t be a huge effort but it would be one of the larger structural changes I made since publishing the initial version of this site.

Ultimately, while I think it makes sense to present first-time visitors with a blurb about myself, from a UX perspective this does force returning readers to click through at least two pages to access my newest post.

I’m thinking that moving my Home page content to an About page and featuring my post content up front would have the most net benefit. Readers would have an easier time getting to my posts and my bio content would still be there for those interested in it.

Do you have a preference when it comes to blog structure? Am I overthinking it? If you have any opinions on this, I’d like to know. Reply to this post via email and lets chat about it.

Design Archival Project

Scott Knight — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 14:08:42 -0500

I thought it’d be a fun exercise to create a space for tracking changes to this site’s design, as I’m always tinkering with the theme and improving various things. I wanted to do this in a visual way so I can look back and get a sense of how things evolve over time.

To avoid loading a ton of screenshots onto the site, I’m using Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to snapshot the site when I make big changes and linking to those instead. This effectively provides an archive that can be interacted with, rather than just browsing photos.

The new archive page lives here: Design Archive

As of now I do want to keep things content-focused and avoid a bunch of bells and whistles, so I don’t anticipate any big changes to the structure of the site. This is also how I keep things somewhat consistent as I still want returning visitors to be able to recognize my site to some degree.

Just wanted to drop a quick note here in case others are interested in this sort of thing.

Subscribe via Email

Scott Knight — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 14:57:55 -0500

An element of any good website/personal blog is that it allows readers to consume content in a variety of formats. That being said, I’ve spent some time debating on whether to add a way to subscribe via email, because I want to do it in a way that won’t become a pain to maintain. I also don’t want to maintain a separate newsletter that would require a manual copy/paste process.

I looked around at some other folks’ blogs to see how they handled their email distros, and I think I’ve found a solution I like.

Using Buttondown, I’m able to have their system consume my existing RSS Feed to populate an email template that will go out to the mailing list. This is great because it’s all completely automated. So if you decide to subscribe, the only emails you’ll receive from me are copies of my future posts.

A few notes on this:

I combed through Buttondown’s settings to ensure that there will be no tracking. I don’t need it and you probably don’t want it anyway.
This is simply another way for you to receive my posts. The emails will only contain a copy of the post text and a link to the original web version when I publish a new blog post on this site.
I will not send any other emails. No marketing rubbish, no product launches; just blog posts.
As with the “Reply via email” button below all of my posts, you’ll be able to reply to the Buttondown emails and I’ll receive them so we can continue the conversation. Feel free to reach out any time.

If this all sounds good and you want my future posts sent right your inbox, you can sign up using the form below any blog post.

Thanks for reading!

A Fresh Face for Fall

Scott Knight — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 13:43:42 -0500

It’s almost fall, y’all. In the next few weeks we head into fall with the Autumnal Equinox, which falls (no pun intended) on September 23, 2023.

Inspired by the impending fall season and the antiquarian philosophy books I’ve been reading lately, I felt like playing around with the site theme a bit. So, on this corner of the internet we’re heading into fall a bit early with this new theme I’m calling “Library”.

The rich leather and paper hues as well as the serif font are a nod to the warm, cozy ambiance of your favorite library reading nook.

You’ll notice that I retained the dark-only theme. That’s something I don’t plan to change, but I will continue to play around with the color palette and font elements from time to time. This theme in particular gives the site a fresh, distinguished academic look befitting the more philosophical content I’ve been reading and writing lately.

It is the summer’s great last heat,
It is the fall’s first chill: They meet.

–– Sarah Morgan, Bryan Piatt

100 Days to Offload

Scott Knight — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 09:30:12 -0500

Publish 100 posts on your personal blog in a year. That’s it, that’s the challenge.

Seems simple enough, so why not?

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve gone through several (at a minimum) iterations of starting a new site/personal blog as an online hub. The problem I’ve always run into is that I always felt the need to write for some particular audience, rather than for myself.

This time I realized that no one’s asking me to do that. This site is my site, and I can post whatever I want here. Hopefully those who read this will find something useful or interesting, but the point here isn’t to amass imaginary points in my analytics dashboard or to feel good about how many people sign up for my newsletter. At this point, I don’t even have a newsletter, and that’s intentional.

The thing is, people are more complex and multi-faceted than what you normally see in someone’s online presence. I don’t want to be relegated to writing about just one topic like tech or business here. I’m going to use this as a tool to think through concepts, save good ideas, and hopefully help someone else in the process. That’s the goal.

The practice of regular writing is also good for the mind, and this has so far been a great exercise in getting some of my thoughts out into the world.

I want to keep my flywheel spinning here with regard to blogging momentum, so I’m taking on the 100 Days to Offload challenge in order to keep the momentum going.

P.S. Yes, I’m still counting my first posts so I’ve given myself a bit of a head start. Sue me (please don’t).

Ready Player One

Scott Knight — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 17:36:42 -0500

As I’m putting the finishing touches on this site, I’m also thinking back on the graveyard of “personal sites past” I’ve left behind over the years.

Since the dawn of the internet, there’s been an unspoken peer pressure to create a “digital presence” where people can find you online (doubly so for developers). For most people these days, social media fills this void. I’ve never really been thrilled with social media and, while I have accounts on a few platforms, I post maybe a couple times per year at most.

A more useful thing to have is a place to keep ideas, resources, and other sundry tidbits that I may want to look back on later. In recent years I’ve come across Tiago Forte’s idea of building a second brain. The only issue is that I can’t figure out what type of person has the time or attention to maintaining such a detailed thing.

Certainly not me.

Not only that, but the principles of POSSE are hard to argue against. Why create content on someone else’s platform when I can just put everything I want here as a single source of truth for all my online content?

You may have also noticed that the design here is brutally minimal. That’s also intentional. In past projects, there’s always been another platform to upgrade, a code library to update, yada yada yada. With the goal of avoiding that rigmarole here, this site will remain content-focused. It’s beauty is in its simplicity. Like the creator of the 512K Club states, the internet has become a bloated mess, and I don’t intend to contribute to that trend.

The more you get carried away with shiny libraries and tools, the more technical debt you create for yourself. Keep it simple. I’m aiming to do just that, while paying homage to the barebones-yet-nostalgic sites of Web 1.0.

Thanks to my former colleague zwbetz and his detailed intro to Hugo, I was able to set this up quickly and intend to keep it running as one of the most lightweight sites around.