This is simply Jonathan, a new blog. By no means a new type of blog, so don’t get your hopes up.

However, there’s something new. I have, for quite a while now, been writing a blog called holst.notes. Yet, I found that I needed to create another type of blog. holst.notes is, as the name sort of implies, supposed to be a collection of small notes, but I also wanted a place to write longer, thought-through essays, which didn’t seem to fit the format of holst.notes.

So I created simply Jonathan, supposed to be that center of essays by me.

Difference

simply Jonathan is not here to take over holst.notes, it’s rather here to compliment it. I have not defined rules for what goes where, but I think that quick ideas, etc. I get, go into holst.notes, while ideas I’ve been thinking about for a long time, go here.

As is quite well-known, thoughts evolve. Thus, a note I think about for a second might linger in my brain for a while, eventually turning into full-fleshed essay material.

A lingual note

Being neither British nor American, my English is neither. Thus, I might end up mixing colour and color, and other differences the two variants have. I beg you to bear with me.

Format decisions

1. One of the primary things I find separates simply Jonathan from a regular blog is my explicit desire to only show one entry per page. This serves the idea of essays and allows me to show a full entry even at the front page.

2. Comments. It has been said on many occasions that for a blog to be a blog, it has to have comments, and that the comments are in fact the most important fact, as discussion is good. I don’t believe this to be true; discussion is good, but blog comments aren’t. I’ll elaborate on this later on.

3. Mike Lee, a Mac programmer, recently started a blog, and the first entry stated, that the date was not important, and that he would go back and change the content, if his opinion on the matter changed.

   I considered this approach, but came to the conclusion that it was bullshit. There is a saying that goes “every text is a product of the time in which is was written”. I believe this to be true, so I decided the date should be displayed, and that in fact both the published and last edited date should be shown. Whether you go by this “I’ll go back and edit it” route, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the initial time of writing (nor the time of editing) doesn’t matter.

4. I also decided to adopt John Gruber’s footnotes. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but should it be necessary, I found it most appropriate to adopt the best way I’ve seen this done online.

5. Table of contents. This was mostly implemented for kicks, but I considered, that if I really am going to write lengthy essays, a TOC might come in handy.

Topics

The topic of a writing is always important. However, given that I am one with quite a lot of interests, there might very well be quite a lot topics appearing here. I’ll probably talk most about the following, though:

• Technology. I have a deep interest in programming languages, particularly Python, and the Semantic Web.
• Politics. With a world view deeply rooted in the socialist left, I see quite a lot of problems with the world as is.
• Linguistics. I enjoy lingual differences and peculiar parts of English and Danish.
• Sports. Being a huge fan of football/soccer, I will probably write something about this.

Technical

This section can be skipped, if programming and the likes does not interest you.

This site is powered by my own Django-based CMS. I considered some of the available systems out there, but found that none of them were really geared towards the sort of writing I intend here. Plus, doing it yourself can be quite fun. The site is written using standards compliant HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. The entries are written using John Gruber and Aaron Swartz’ Markdown.

The hosting is powered by GMTA ApS.

This is simply Jonathan. Enjoy.