Gatsby Blog

I've just obtained the spatialparalysis.xyz domain. I'm going to move my blog here from my old blog/portfolio website (nearimprov.com). I wanted to try out Gatsby JS, so that I could build some little React components and include them in various places. I've used React a lot over the last two years, and since I've accepted a new job with much less web development, I might have the desire to make some components for fun rather than for profit.

I haven't written anything this year, but I hope to get back into the swing of things next year when I'm more in my element.

Why "Spatial Paralysis"?

Well, I really just wanted:

1. A domain that is better than "nearimprov.com". This was easy, since the old domain communicated exactly nothing. I think I picked it with a random generator of word pairs until I arrived at a pair of words that sounded like more than nothing, but less than anything. I'm not going to renew that domain.
2. A domain that communicates "spatial". My Masters degree is in geographic information systems. I will talk about it a lot. I will use my knowledge of the area to feed my family. Although I have general reservations about the field, for better or for worse my hat is in the ring. Spatial systems are my speciality, and—momentarily putting aside all forms of imposter syndrome—I'm an expert in the field.
3. A silly-therefore-memorable name. Eventually I settled on a rather crude rhyming pun on "facial paralysis". I was thinking about other blogs that follow a similar kind of naming strategy, such as the SaltyCrane Blog.

What's left to do?

• I need to migrate all my old content to this blog, which will be a little bit of a manual process than I'd like, because I didn't entirely stick to simple Markdown content.
• I also want to implement tags. (Note: done!)
• I need to get the Disqus comments working again, hopefully without losing comments. I've been through this once before, and it was a bit of a pain.
• I'd also like to be able to post privately, perhaps behind a password, or even a full authentication system with Auth0. Then I could write updates for IRL friends and family using their social logins, without sharing things with the wider world. This would be doubly nice since I've stopped using social media.
• I still haven't worked out timezones in my post metadata. We have a rule of thumb at work: when implmenting a feature that involves time, the complexity of the feature is +2 effort points harder than you think. Every time.