I do actually have plans to learn enough html to swap my Wordpress site over to a self-hosted self-designed website, I just have to, like, get good enough with HTML and CSS and especially CSS to get Gwern’s nice sidenotes
You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites’ designs over the years and now decades.
and hosting and how to do comments. It’s gonna happen, though. Any day now.
One thing Substack does that you can’t get super-easily from a static site is comments and emailing your readers with new articles (feeds are, unfortunately, mostly a nerd-only technology).
You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites’ designs over the years and now decades.
One thing Substack does that you can’t get super-easily from a static site is comments and emailing your readers with new articles (feeds are, unfortunately, mostly a nerd-only technology).