Words like “playground”, “digital garden” or “digital garage” probably describe Studio2AM best.

I’m 99% sure you’re already familiar with these IndieWeb and SmallWeb terms, but in case you aren’t, I strongly recommend you get into it. There are a lot of good reasons, but in my own words: I find it a wholesome and fulfilling approach to using the web.

Also, I simply love typing. Some of my early memories are sitting at my father’s PC, hitting keys and watching things appear on the screen. There’s still an appeal to that. Having a nice clack-clack-clack mechanical keyboard with easy to press keys makes it a real joy.

About the Name

I like the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on “Studio”:

“A studio is a space set aside for creative work of any kind, including art, dance, music and theater.”

That part was easy. But why 2AM?

I suppose because at 2AM, no one will be bothering you. Most people are asleep. If you’re awake, it’s completely your own time.1

You could say the same about 1 AM or midnight, but to me these two are still associated with “gotta go to bed now”. If I’m up at 2AM, it’s usually because I got deep into something and forgot about the time. Or because I have no obligations the next day and can afford to stay up so late.

In any case, there are many positive associations with this time of the night.

Site Philosophy, Goals etc.

I’ll try to add some more profound thoughts about personal websites in general here.

Linking ideas - In my opinion, even a page with little content can have merits. By linking to other blogs or articles you can contribute to an organic growth of the web, the spread and association of ideas. If Alice is writing about A, and Bob is writing about B, and you read both of their articles, find a common theme that you point out while linking to their respective articles, you created an association and made it available for others to discover.

Manifesting ideas - Even if a website has no readers, creating it has merits for the writer. It can be surprising to come back to texts you wrote five years ago and discover the thoughts you had. Like “did I really write that?!” Putting thoughts into words often makes it easier to build on them, to advance to the next step instead of circling around the same idea. It also helps to discover holes in your thinking. Making things public forces just a little bit more care and thought about what a potential reader might think or learn.

I didn’t come up these ideas in a void, and in the spirit of “linking ideas”, I’ll refer you to the website of Andy Matuschak for a lot of inspiration.

There’s a whole community built around note-taking, second brain and concepts like these.

Technical stuff

How did I make the page?

The page was built using Jekyll and Moonwalk. Jekyll makes it easy to generate static HTML from Markdown, and Moonwalk is a pretty theme. Actually, if you go to the Moonwalk repo and clone it, it has everything you need along with some example content that gives you an idea on how it all fits together. Assuming you have Ruby installed, but the Jekyll documentation has a good explanation for that, too.

Why use Jekyll?

Originally, I made some pages with React, but if you just want to write a blog article to put some thoughts down, having to fiddle with CSS and file structure even just a little bit increases the threshold too much. I ended up not putting anything new on the site.

I write a lot of personal notes using Obsidian, which is a deep rabbit hole in itself. If you don’t know Obsidian, it’s basically Markdown on Steroids. Since Jekyll can work off of Markdown, it allows me to easily export Obsidian notes so they appear as articles on here.

Footnotes:

  1. This won’t apply if you’re working night shift. I’m sorry. ↩