Hello. I’m L. Rhodes, a writer by trade and a longtime digital tinkerer. destructured is a little online corner for thinking through how changing digital technology affects our efforts to build community, both online and off. Everything you’ll find here is written on the principle that structure and design shape the sort of relationships and communities that are possible.
My principal outlet for social media these days is Merveilles Town, a Hometown instance. To that end, much of my current interest in digital social spaces centers on the federated network of services colloquially known as the fediverse.
Most of the posts here start with me thinking aloud on my account. In fact, this site began as a joke about my posting habits there:
The catch-22 of my account is that, yes, that thread could have been a blogpost, but also, no, I never would have gotten around to writing a blogpost.
Which got me to thinking: Maybe a blog doesn’t have to be anything more than taking the raw material of what I already do on social media, and editing it into something with a bit more structure and direction.
I also maintain a more garden-like personal site at lrhodes.net.
Colophon
destructured uses Jekyll to serve flat files with a custom theme that I will occasionally break. The site is “static,” meaning that the pages contain no browser-side scripts. The site title and dates are set in Fira Mono. Other headings are set in Public Sans. Charter is used for most other text.
Privacy
I use a log file analyzer to track data about the site. Log file analyzers surface only the data necessary to the basic operation of a website—e.g. page hits, unique visitors, error messages, etc. That’s generally the least invasive way to keep an eye on statistics about a site. No other methods are used to collect data about visitors to this site, and none of the data collected is provided to third parties.
Contact
The best place to reach me if you have questions or comments about the site is my fediverse account @lrhodes@merveilles.town. You’re welcome to follow me there, as well.