About Me

This is personal website of a guy called Phil.

He's not the only Phil in the world. In fact, he's not the only Phil Emerson in the world but while names might not be unique, every one of us is in some small way.

Okay, that's enough weird third-person writing.

Hi, I'm Phil!

I'm interested in art, photography, and technology.

I used to have a Wordpress based website but that just became too much of a pain to keep up to date. There was always something that needed to be updated whether it was the core, a plugin or a theme to keep the site secure.

It felt like I was spending more time on maintaining the website framework than on creating content and then one day, I realised I'd stopped creating content at all.

I'm now experimenting with static websites for my personal stuff to see if that will get me back into writing again.

A static website is a website that doesn't change. With a framework like Wordpress, anyone with an account can log into the site and edit and create pages or posts on the site but by its very nature, that makes it a security risk. That login is publicly available and there's a legion of horrible people out there, trying to break into Wordpress websites every single minute of the day.

A static website like this one is generated from text files and then the resulting content is uploaded to its home on the Internet. There are no databases, no login pages and much, much less to go wrong. Oh, and they're much faster too.

I'm using a Ruby application called [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) to generate mine. I write the content using Markdown, then enter a command on the computer that uses Jekyll to compile the files into a website that's then pushed on to the Internet for you to see.

It's all rather magical.