as i'm writing this, i'm just finishing up what (should be) the final bit of maitenence / upkeep tooling for my site. when i started this, i thought hosting the site at a backup sync folder on my home server would be a good idea. but it's turned out that doing it that way results in my site's public folder periodically deleting itself if it doesn't win the race condition between the Zola build command and Syncthing's sync check interval. so sometimes my site just disappears from my machine. cool stuff.
i'll get over the embarassment i have about my writing style / voice in time. i have a lot more fun reading back what i've written when i know i'm the only one who can read it. knowing that other people can now see it though has me a lot less interested. i have this same problem with college essays. i still have no clue what the comments on my last semester's sociology intro 2 final are, only that it was good enough to finish the course with an A and that that's all i care about. i'm a very passionate person, but very shy, and i very easily double back on my ideas if they receive even the slightest comment or criticism. i guess that's a confidence or self-esteem thing, though not in the sense i'd expect for that to feel. i feel confident when i'm in control, and being perceived and evaluated means i'm surrendering that to someone else? that's for another time.
i had a lot of fun learning perl, and i'm likely to return to it again someday. for now, though, i've got to make a decision. i'm told a lot online that one should learn C before learning either rust or zig, so that you can see "why zig or rust is necessary" or something along these lines. almost every major software vulnerability in the modern day is a near direct result of C being ancient, so they say. rust looks too scary, i read one aphorism online that said "rust makes writing bad code difficult, zig makes writing good code easy" and made my decision. i'll learn the one that this guy said is easy.