This Website

16 Jan 2026

This is my personal website. So far it's been mostly miscellaneous web pages. But lately I've been thinking I should add more written content.

This Blog

Blog is an abbreviation of "web log". Blogs today are usually serious works of writing, but in the past, a web log was just whatever the site owner decided to write down that day. This blog is more like a web log.

It's popular for blogs to have a specific purpose or theme. I don't think this blog will have a theme other than that it's written by me.

Verbosity

If you find me writing in a verbose style, like in this blog post, I'm probably not trying to get any specific point across. My writing style is much more condensed when a specific point needs to be made. There's a time and a place for every verbosity level though.

Words today are more abundant than ever. When I see a wall of text in 2026 I immediately suspect that it was not written by a human. So just FYI, my walls of text are 100% organic.

This Website's Style

Why does it look so old?

At 26, I'm not particularly old. The style of this website is older than me.

Web design is 99% typesetting, the art of deciding where, when, why, and how text should appear on a page. There's a lot more to it than you might expect. Especially in the web browser, where a page can be any size and contain any content.

The remaining 1% of web design is mostly about colors, images, borders, and other visual elements. Mostly useful to establish a brand. But this is a personal website, and I'm not so interested in branding myself.

I spend enough time tinkering with the typesetting for all the other websites I make, so I prefer this default solution on my personal site. It's surprisingly practical.

This Website's Name

My last name is Giroux. It's difficult to read, spell, pronounce, and remember. My Giroux lineage has been American for a long time, but -oux names just don't anglicize very well. What would it even be? Jiroo? yuck.

So I've never gone after a domain name like timgiroux.com. If I told someone, audibly, to go to timgiroux.com, they would never be able to spell it!

When I say, "go to gtim.xyz", it's crystal clear. There's novelty to a 4 letter domain name. The reputation of ".xyz" isn't great, but I think it works well for this site anyways. gtim.xyz has an x, like Giroux, so that's cool.

Paul Graham has some game theory ideas about why you should never use a domain other than ".com". I mostly agree with him. But I don't think I'll be buying gtim.com anytime soon. He's mostly talking about startups anyways.

This Website's Implementation

Markdown is cool. But you know what's even cooler? HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I use a tiny python script to build a static site from loosely organized jinja templates and assets. I would share the source code for my custom picoSSG, but anyone who might be interested can just write it themselves in about 5 minutes.

SSGs are more popular than hand made "picoSSGs" for reasons that have nothing to do with the complexity of the underlying program. It's mind-numbingly simple to use a templating language or markdown renderer to create html files. I think it has more to do with themes (or in other words, typesetting) which get weirdly difficult if you want your content to look modern. Not a problem for me, I just let my website look old.

I push changes to a private github repo which is hooked up to cloudflare pages for hosting. It's fast, scalable, and it doesn't cost me a dime. I've also done quite a few static frontends hosted on AWS S3 and Cloudfront. This website was on there for a while but I felt like my deployment flow was janky and annoying to set up. I love how easy it is to hook up Cloudflare Pages auto build and deploy.

Self hosting is great in theory but I don't want to complicate my relationship with my liege lord ISP.