Hello there, my name is Luke Scalone, and you’ve managed to stumble across the first page of my new website!

I’ve created other websites before: a blitzing, fast-paced, three-times per week personal blog; a weekly, long-form essay column, and a personal exploratory site that was embedded in the IndieWeb. I’ve learned a lot from these experiences, and this website is an attempt to thread the needle between my interests.

The issue, I’ve come to believe, is the inherent separation that was being created between my “professional” and “personal” life. While it is important to balance these two categories, I found that it made little sense to think about them as separate spheres. After all, I am one person, and my professional identity is an important part of myself. Nevertheless, many of my hobbies intersect with my workplace interests, and it makes sense for me to place them here.

What is this place?

You will find that this website is a portfolio: On one page, I offer some information about me; on another, I highlight my work experience, my research interests, and my skill set.

Just as significantly, you’ll see that this website is home to countless pages of writing. The writing section is the blog. If you’re reading this, you’re already engaging with this section! In addition, I maintain the compendium, which is my own personal encyclopedia. Rather than understand this page as an academic encyclopedia, I elevate my own voice. It is intentionally an experiment in synthesis: how can I combine academic research and non-fiction writing with my own perspectives?

The other major section is the library. The library itself can be viewed as having three wings.

The first wing is where I curate resources. I love to investigate things online, in print, and in the community, and this is a way for me to make information legible. The amount of information at our disposal has its benefits, but I tend these resources with love and care. Hopefully, you’ll find them as useful as I do.

In the second wing, I share reviews and commentary of different media that I engage with. More than any other sort of material, you’ll find that I’ve left behind a trail of discussions on books. But I also write about films, series, movies, and games.

Finally, the third wing is a collection of interesting pages and articles that I’ve found online. I make sure to leave a short description of why I thought it was significant, in case you wanted to check it out too. While this section of my website might appear more wild than other sections, it is a great place to explore new topics online.

Some influences

I’ve worked hard to make this website quite different from mainstream websites on the corporate web. For one, it does not generate any revenue. In fact, I see the development and maintenance of this space as a source of joy in its own right! The layout, style, and content was all produced in my own free time.

While I used a static-site generator, Hugo, to eliminate the repetitiveness of copying and pasting lines of HTML (and ensuring that links stay active), I wrote the HTML, CSS, and content that line each and every page of this website.

I’ve been heavily influenced by the IndieWeb movement, and I’ve put the human first. This website does not go through an in-depth process of search engine optimization (SEO), although I do include page descriptions and keywords for the sake of internet accessibility. I also don’t use a content management system (CMS) for this website.

Another major influence on me has been the Small Web movement. While I haven’t gone so far as others have in writing exclusively HTML or keeping the whole site under 1 MB (or even 256 KB!), I’ve opted to limit the amount of graphics, I don’t use any slow MySQL databases or languages like PHP, and you won’t even find JavaScript on the site. I also don’t use any cookies or analytics, meaning that there will be nothing from this site that tracks you anywhere else.

Finally, Maggie Appleton’s writing on digital gardening has made an enormous impact on me. Rather than think about the blog or social media site as the overarching idea of how to model the web, I’ve found it important to (1) curate information already out there, and (2) create my own content. This does not mean hitting “send” and never touching a piece of writing again. The compendium is my way of going back to what I already know and cultivating it over time. If you want to create your own digital garden, be sure to check out Appleton’s other article, “Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks.”

If you like what you see here, this is a sign for you to go out and do the same!