Welcome to my blog! My name is Misha Brukman; in case we haven’t met, you can read a bit about me or see my social profiles below for more information.

After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve decided to start running a personal website again. While this blog will likely contain a number of technical posts, it will not be limited to technology.

Speaking of this blog and technology, in case you’re interested in how this site is built, see about this site for the details and references.

Note: see the addendum for updates after publication.

Interestingly enough, my last website (started in 2002) was also a statically-generated site, but as it predated not only most current static-content generators, but also the invention of Markdown (2004), it was using plain HTML¹ and CSS, with a custom generator toolkit, written in my shell of choice at the time, namely tcsh.

Why shell? Why not? It has all the necessary features for a website generator:

• conditionals
• variables, including support for environment variables
• templates via /bin/cat + features above

so it was quite sufficient for what I needed at the time. Of course, it had no themes, instant preview, or any other magic to it, but it was simple and it worked.

Why tcsh specifically? Let’s explore that in a future post.

Suffice it to say that I’m happy to be using the newer stack and look forward to writing more with this setup!

Addendum

• The “future post” referred to above is now live!
• Related work: bashblog is a similar idea as above, but in Bash.