Things Nobody Asked For

So I built a blog. Again.

I know.

how it started

Basically: "what if I wrote stuff down somewhere?" That was the whole thought. Very simple. Very achievable. Except I can't just open a text file and start typing, apparently. I need to pick a tool first. Then evaluate the tool. Then read about the tool. Then read about other tools. Then end up on a Hacker News thread from 2019 wondering if I should learn Rust just to better appreciate the thing I'm about to use.

The thing: Zola. Static site generator, written in Rust, single binary, no nonsense. I didn't write it. I don't know Rust. But it felt right and at some point you just go with it.

the theme

zola-hacker. It looks like a terminal threw up a blog and I mean that in the best possible way. Monospaced, minimal, slightly intimidating for no reason. The kind of aesthetic that implies you have opinions about text editors, which I do, but that's a different post.

It lives as a git submodule. Git submodules are one of those things that work fine until they don't and then you spend 20 minutes on Stack Overflow pretending you understand what happened.

I also immediately started tweaking templates and overriding things because I have a problem.

hosting and deploy

Cloudflare Pages. Free. Deploys automatically when I push to main, which is the part that still feels like magic even though I've done it a hundred times.

The build command is genuinely unhinged:

curl -sL https://github.com/getzola/zola/releases/download/v0.22.1/zola-v0.22.1-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz | tar xz && ./zola build

Every single deploy downloads the Zola binary from GitHub. Every time. Is this correct? Debatable. Does it work? Yes, perfectly, every time, which I find both reassuring and slightly annoying because it means I can't even complain about it.

the name

"Things Nobody Asked For." I think I spent more time on this than on everything else combined, which says a lot about me.

It works because it's true and because it sets expectations at exactly zero. Nobody's coming here for breaking news or actionable advice. If something lands, great. If not, well — title.

anyway

It's done. It works. It took way longer than it should have for something that is, at its core, a folder of text files with a build step.

Now I just have to actually write things.

Welcome.

This is Things Nobody Asked For, a small corner of the internet dedicated to thoughts, observations, experiments, and other mildly unnecessary ideas.

No clear theme. No editorial plan. No promise that any of this will be useful.

Sometimes it might be about photography. Sometimes about technology. Sometimes about things I noticed while walking around. Sometimes about things that probably shouldn’t have been written down in the first place.

The internet is already full of content optimized for attention, growth, engagement, and algorithms.

This is not that.

This is simply a place for notes, curiosities, and small ideas that didn’t have anywhere else to go.

If you find something interesting here, that’s a pleasant accident.

If not, well… nobody asked for it anyway.