A Work of My Hands
April 16, 2025
How shall the work of my hands be bought and sold?
asked the poet, Nick Lindsay. He was by trade a carpenter and boat builder on Edisto Island, outside Charleston, South Carolina, and a friend of my father. His poem having that particular line perused the puzzlement he found in ...men who hire boats built.
This little code diary shall be a work of my hands. It means I will write all of it: not only the words that show up as a web page in browser software but also the code defining its format and layout. Every post. Every bit of it.
Oh, yes. I know. These days we enjoy abundance of brilliant software tools designed to make writing for the web easier and more productive. I am familiar with them. You might have heard of some widely-used, open-source solutions. I shall not use any of them for this diary:
- WordPress,
- Markdown,
- Jekyll,
- Liquid,
- Sea Monkey,
This, however, is just a diary. It should be — in both substance and appearance — as plain and simple and easy to start with as paper and pencil. Just begin; maybe get better along the way. It needs only the basic languages of the web: html for content and structure, css for styling and formatting how it displays.
It also needs a network of links to keep it organized. The whole idea behind the internet is to make pages available in arbitrary order, no longer restricted to a single, rigid sequence such as the date written, a page number in a book or alphabetical placement in a file folder.
This post accompanies a new feature to the home page: a list of links to topics. The links bring up pages which, in turn, link to posts that I associate with a topic.
I take the time to build each of those links by hand, rather than to rely on a shortcut like WordPress to create them.
Granted, WordPress can be great for people who choose to use it. They can simply type what they want to say and be done with it. WordPress automates the organization and delivers a nice display.
I go my own way for two reasons. First, a previous attempt at writing a blog using WordPress ended badly. I maintained the blog with a big, commercial Web services provider that need not be named here. We may call it, “YoMommy”. Nasty hackers got up under YoMommy's skirts, so to speak, and wrecked my site. All of a sudden, YoMommy started wanting hundreds of extra dollars per year for optional “protection”. I felt ill-served by YoMommy.
The problem I encountered could have been due to a weak place in the stack of other software running on YoMommy's equipment — a database, PHP interpreter, who-knows what-all else — that WordPress relies upon for its dynamic flexibility.
By contrast, a simple, static approach such as I am taking here may be less vulnerable because it involves no other software. It reduces the attack surface, as the saying is.
Second reason: writing it all out by hand keeps me aware of what I offer here. No; awareness is not quite the right word. Attendance is better. One attends to the work of one’s hands, not only at the time of first making but thereafter also.
Upon completing a page like this one, more work remains to do. Create a link to it. Add the link to various other pages, such as the list of articles for a month or those for various topics where I think it might belong. Come back later to prune a sentence or to extend a paragraph. Add the link in future to new topic lists I had not thought of when I first wrote the page.
It is gardening, but for words: cultivating thoughts for the slow joy of watching them grow and for the hope seeing ideas bloom.
A friend asked me, Will you make web pages for hire?
Oh, no. No. This is my diary. I write it for my own amazement. Wish upon me no men who hire web pages built. No more shall the work of my hands be bought and sold!