I'm Andy Chase. You wouldn't know it to look at this one, but I've been building web sites and applications in one form or another since about 1995.
This site is a deliberate rejection of most of the time and energy I have spent over the last 20+ years over-thinking, over-organizing, and overbuilding my personal web site. It's a loose collection of stuff I've done over the years, but it's not really a blog. The dates don't matter to anyone but me, and I'm not going to hold forth about anything and/or post about my day-to-day adventures. Also, I've always sort of hated the word 'blog'.
It is old-school World Wide Web: a collection of static hypertext documents, images, and maybe some other binary resources. You click a link, the browser refreshes with the page you requested. No AJAX, no javascript frameworks, barely any CSS. Loads fast, works on desktops, phones, and in Lynx.
The personal web sites I have always liked best are the ones where someone just throws photos and notes about their various avocations and mad scientist projects into some hastily constructed HTML documents. That's the vibe I'm going for here, although I am using Pelican under the hood to manage the basic drudgery of menu management and cross-linking of pages.
My plan is to start consolidating bits and pieces of projects from previous personal web projects, so it's likely to be a patchwork for a while.
Meanwhile, please have a look at the Projects page.
My very first online handle, chosen for the Commodore 64 Quantum Link service, was "Moondog8". Moondog was a celebrated avant garde/outsider composer, but I didn't know about any of that back then; the only Moondog song I'd heard at that time was the haunting Be A Hobo, a canon in 5/4 time that 11 year-old me had heard a couple of years earlier on Doctor Demento and been enchanted by.
Other handles have come and gone over the years, but as I embrace the old-school/DIY aesthetic of tilde club, it seems fitting to go back to basics. Also, I am still enchanted by that song.
Last updated: Mon 28 October 2019