Motivating this site
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"Title": "Motivating this site",
"ShortDescription": "About gregorycotton.ca",
"PublishedDate": "2025-06-17",
"LastUpdated": "2026-07-25",
"URL": "motivating-this-site",
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}I read a quote a while back, from whom I can't remember, that said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that "with as much information and data as we have in our society today, context is the ultimate luxury". I actually can't find who said this anywhere or where I saw it, but it's one that's stayed with me.
17/06/2025: I stumbled back across it: the quote, verbatim this time, is "In the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context" and it was written by Kevin Kelly, co-founder of WIRED, in the early 1990s. Link.
But but as much as I appreciate context, it can be garish – it can be imposing, heavy-handed. Like a lengthy plaque on a museum who's statement about an art piece is a little too didactic, a little too prescriptive; as if you cannot be trusted to engage meaningfully on your own.
I've long struggled with how to contextualize and present my work. I've spent a great deal of time over the last half decade thinking about the best approach to taxonomizing my projects, but no matter what conclusion I come to it always comes mentally-undone within a short few months. This obsession of mine is so great that I think a lot of my friends believe I consistently have reworked my website out of a love for designing websites – and while partially true, really what it has been is a search for how to present myself on the internet.
I ultimately have decided upon this website: rather creating a taxonomy for my work I have settled on an ontology of sorts, where projects can be filtered or searched for based on attributes I have defined, but where no hierarchy exists.
Ideally, rather than having who I am laid bare in a tell-all 'about' page, or curating what I've worked on to a tidy set of projects, I've decided you can get to know me by watching my interests change along with the mediums and topics I engage in, supplemented by a quick blurb about what my media diet looks like whenever I choose to update this site further. I was largely inspired by Daniel Eatock and Max Kohler who's websites are amongst my favourites. I am quite fond of Daniel's site in particular, which has creations of his dating back to when he was in high school. In a similar vein, I aim to continuously add works from my past to this site to build a better picture for others of who I am and how I became who I am at any given moment.
The site itself is just HTML/CSS and JavaScript with a PHP backend and a SQLite database. I like it, I think it works well – maybe a bit overkill for my use case but I had fun making it, and for a personal website I believe that's what matters most.
25/07/2026: This website is now a static build.
30/09/2025: I wrote (and was planning on publishing) this closer to when I first pushed this version of my site live, but found it really ironic to publish writing contextualizing my website which exists in opposition to tactless contextualization. Now I just think it's kind of silly and figured why not.