17 November, 2025
#New Site
This is my new personal site. The main difference is that the old one ran on hosted Wordpress, while this one is a static site generated by some code I wrote.
#Why CC (BY-NC-SA)?
I’ve chosen to by default licence all of the content that I publish on this website (and the code used to generate it), including my photography, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. My reasoning is as follows:
- In line with my personal philosophy, I want everything I publish to be open and free to use.
- Attribution: I would like to be attributed for my work. Not much to say here.
- Non-commercial: I do not want my work to be used for commercial gain, especially not by corporations or for commercial AI endeavours (see Using CC-Licensed Works for AI Training). (To be honest, I’d rather my work not be used in any way with respect to AI, but I feel that the non-commercial requirement would pre-empt almost all of it. That is, of course, assuming that licences are heeded.)
- Share alike: If others creatively build upon my work (which I absolutely support!), I want even more people to be afforded the same rights and be able to build upon it further. This is most easily ensured by forcing it to be licenced the same way.
It is worth noting that I considered CC0 and the Unlicense, but the reason I ultimately chose not to was that, while I wanted to licence my photography permissively, I did not want to do it so permissively. Granted, I could have licenced the SSG code and output separately and under something more open, but I chose not to due to the additional complications that it would introduce.
#Why Not Wordpress?
In short: I greatly dislike Wordpress. I find it to be far too heavy, complex, and opinionated for my use case, which is just to publish some writing and my photography. An SSG is just far simpler. Further, writing my own, though it takes more work, allows for far more flexibility with the little things (e.g. custom Markdown syntax extensions, customised rendering, etc.).