About this blog

Why this is here

The purpose of this blog is twofold:

1. I felt like my html and css skills were getting a bit rusty, so I decided to spend some time creating a simple css layoutThe css is available at this GitHub repository. that would be appropriate for writing longer works on a web platform. So far it is not particularly advanced, but it has served its purpose as far as refreshing some of the details of css in my mind. It's also a place for me to experiment a bit with designing web layouts. Everything is hand-coded in html and css; I hope to potentially experiment with JavaScript here too.
2. I felt like it might be useful to have a place to publish some thoughts distinct from my academic work. I have thoughts on things beyond language and linguistics that I wouldn't mind spelling out in a more public context, and since I am no big fan of TwitterI am happy to discuss with you in private why I believe so-called Twitter threads to be a pernicious scourge. (which is a terrible platform for expressing ideas of even moderate length) I figured something akin to a traditional blog might be worth attempting.

I don't expect to write regularly at this point (January 2020) and I don't expect to have regular readers. The point here, rather, is to give myself a public-facing space to leave some of my thoughts as I have them. So please do not expect regular (or frequent) updates.

What's with the side notes?

A lot of web pages include footnotes. I believe this is a mistake. Footnotes on web pages are often a holdoverSome websites (e.g. Wikipedia) are better off with footnotes rather than sidenotes. from books and other print media meant to place relevant but supplemental or adscititious information outside the flow of the main text. Even in print media, locating the appropriate footnote and then returning to the correct spot in the main text can be difficult. If you've ever had to read a PDF file with footnotes on a laptop, you know this can be frustrating.Scrolling online media exacerbates this problem because it is often not possible to keep the footnote and the relevant text on the screen at the same time while maintaining a text size sufficiently large to read. Side notes (or margin notes as they are sometimes called in print media) avoid this issue by keeping the note located alongside the relevant text, which on the web requires less scrolling and in print media requires less searching on the part of the reader.