hello world June 9th, 2015 – 9pm

I registered this domain, mostly for the email address. (Fun fact: the owner of george.lu is a carpenter in Luxembourg who wanted 1500 Euros for the domain.) After some delay, I finally got the site online in May. The entire thing is simple, but it was interesting and frustrating enough to write a first post.

Style: I loved the tilde.club fad of Fall 2014. I can't credibly claim nostalgia for anything old-school on the internet, but I do miss the weird and overly personal internet I stumbled through as a kid. I'm styling this site in that faded-glory, DIY spirit of some of my favorite internet experiences (Anorak + SomethingAwful forums, Sinister + Indie Pop listservs, webcomics).

In an effort to add some color, I wrote a small tool that converts images into ascii art. I've 'covered' several famous paintings on the geo.rge.lu homepage.

Implementation: KZSU, the college radio station I ran, recently rewrote our public and internal websites in Flask. My friend Mark passed me a copy of Miguel Greenberg's Flask and showed me the basics.

I've since picked up Flask for a few other side-projects. While a modern Python backend does seem incongruous with the retro feel I'm going for, I really do appreciate the simplicity and clarity of Flask APIs; it feels like a natural, barebones choice.

Aside on Jinja2: I've never used any web templating tools, and it feels like playing Minecraft. Snippets and resources snap together with the magic of pseudo-code and intuition of LEGO.

Full stack:
Hosting + Backend + Deployment: Heroku
Language: Python/Flash