I wanted to have a web site. Web sites are cool. Social media platforms have better communication and discovery mechanisms, but you’re at the whim of someone else’s business model. I don’t like the intrusive advertising and data mining inherent to profit-driven social media. Of course, if I just throw all of my social media on the open web, that could just be scraped as well, but I can mostly reduce the downsides of that by not putting personal information on the site. I assume anyone reading this already knows who I am, so if you want to talk to me about something I post, send me an email or a letter or a message or a text or whatever. If you need to get good contact info for me, then you can try to email me via squint-bushel.0i[AT]icloud[DOT]com, but if I get a bunch of spam, then I’m going to delete that email address.

FAQ

See below for the answers to some questions you might be asking:

Why “passwordpaper” for a name?

Two things that cause passwords to be bad are when they are made up of easy things to guess (unfortunately the easiest things to remember tend to be easiest to guess too) and when they are reused. In a simpler time when we only had to keep track of 10 passwords or so, one way to avoid bad passwords was to make random-enough passwords with a random number generator and to write them all on an index card you could keep in your wallet. People already know how to keep little pieces of paper in their wallet safe, and it was a better system than using your dog’s name, your favorite number, and your old school mascot all smushed together as your password for everything. It is not a reference to keeping the password to your computer on a sticky note attached to your computer, which is mostly a bad idea.

Why does your site look like this?

I am not a web designer. Here are the things I want for this site:

  • The site loads quickly.
  • The site looks about the same an any device.
  • The site is legible.
  • The site can be read by a machine for accessibility reasons and so I can scrape the text out of it easily and put it somewhere else.
  • The site is simple enough that it can’t be taken over by malware.

I have opted to use a Jekyll theme in Github pages. This allows people with a better sense of design than me to control how my site looks, and I just have a Github repository full of text files I can easily move elsewhere.