Welcome to my personal website!
Sunday 29 September 2024
Hello and welcome to the first blog post on my new, shiny website!
I’m Jamie Tasker, you can find out about me on the dedicated ‘About’ page, but in a nutshell I’m a data professional, cyclist, runner and hiker currently living in West Yorkshire.
I created this website as as a hobby project to write about topics that I find interesting, including sustainable cities, outdoor adventures, data management and technology. I don’t intend on sticking to specific topics though, so expect a random assortment of themes that may continually change!
This blog acts as my own personal space on the internet. Social media platforms come and go, or can rapidly change their principles based on the ideologies of their owners. A personal blog however, is truly mine, and I can control the look, feel and content of what appears here. To me, this provides the best opportunity to present my thoughts and creativity.
I also find the challenge of developing the website just plain old fun. This blog isn’t running on something like SquareSpace or WordPress (as excellent as those tools are), it's fully developed by me and hosted on a cloud providers virtual Linux server. This makes it a perfect space to practice both my writing and programming skills.
A short history of this blog
Like many other projects, this website started in my bedroom during the deep depths of the 2020 COVID lockdowns. After teaching myself Python in 2016-ish, I wanted to challenge myself into creating something a bit more ‘tangible’ outside of scripting and data manipulation. I started getting to grips with Django and after a few weeks had a prototype of a very basic (but functional) blogging platform.
Then came the part that I thought would be slightly easier. Front-end development and design. Oh how wrong was I?
I already had a degree of experience with HTML, but quickly grew frustrated at the general weirdness when trying to do basic layout arrangements in CSS. Still, perseverance prevailed and I ended up with a basic front end to match my basic blogging platform. This was back in 2020, when the rise of ‘dark mode’ was all the rage, and I was well and truly on board for the ride.
Things then sat dormant for a short period of 4 years, as life slowly returned to normal and a post-pandemic drive to spend as much time outdoors as possible kicked in.
In Summer 2024, I re-discovered the joy that building this website gave me, and spent some time re-designing into the page you’ve got on your screen right now. I said goodbye to the dark theme, adopted a green colour scheme and improved the layout on mobile devices. The blogging engine was also modernised with improvements brought over from Uncharted Territories, a website I built in 2023 by forking the dormant code from this blog.
What didn’t change was the principles behind this website. I want to keep things as simple as possible, meaning theres no ads, no cookies and no trackers. There isn’t even any JavaScript! I’m not interested in your data, and I’m an advocate for protecting user privacy on the internet. As a bi-product of this, it also means the website should be nice and speedy on the oldest of devices 😊.
Interested in staying up to date?
If you’re interested in hearing more from me, please do consider subscribing to the website’s RSS feed. You can also find various social media links and an email address on the ‘Contact’ page.
Thanks a bunch for visiting and reading! I’m not planning on committing to a blogging schedule, but I’ll definitely be posting when I get the inspiration! Whether it’s about the data landscape or outdoor adventures, I hope you’ll find something here that resonates with you. In the meantime, feel free to explore the site, or simply drop by again for future posts.