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Hi, I’m Jay Ray.

Engineered Eloquence was born out of my desire to make a more concerted effort to document my thoughts and life. The site has had a number of different designs, hosting providers, and goals over the years, but it has always been a place for me to play with the web, reflect on life and technology, and share my thoughts.

This is version 7 of the Engineered Eloquence site and with it, I am working on a more focused, more intentional space that I can look back on with pride ten years from now. There will be a lot of 404 errors as I pare down the archive of content. Reach out if you want to read something from the annals.

Need Something?

Email me. Share your thoughts or ask for help. I will respond to any legitimate request.

About the Design

This site runs on GitHub Pages, intentionally with minimal structure and code. This time around, I wanted to use something utilitarian, which led me to Riccardo Graziosi's "No Style, Please" Jekyll theme for GitHub Pages. I took that as a template and started making it my own as I often do with these types of things. The below-listed items are noteworthy in the infrastructure and design.

Some Relevant History

In 2009, I started using Tumblr as a blogging platform. Prior to that, I had a few side projects that helped me gain an understanding of web technologies, all the way back to a website run on Apple's .Mac service using iWeb to build it.

The freedom of posting whatever I wanted to Tumblr with easy-to-use tools was the perfect way to get involved in the social media scene of the time. Looking back, I am astounded how little of what I wrote and shared matters to me now. I have a record of those posts, even transitioning them all to the previous version of the site to allow for a record of my time on the web, but in the move to the current site architecture, I decided to curate the published items, only keeping live those that are important to the journey: my writing.

I have moved the site between providers multiple times and was on Blot from 2015-2022 due to simplicity and an ongoing developer relationship. As with all things, change is inevitable and we need to be intentional with the tools we use and why. I moved back to GitHub Pages in large part because the site needs to continue to evolve and be as simple as possible to allow me to focus on the content.

Get in touch

Support the site

I have never had ads on my websites, save for a short stint back in the late 2000s, when online ads were less intrusive and earned me basically nothing. I will continue to write and post, all without monetizing it, but if you want to support my writing, do so through PayPal here: Engineered Eloquence.

Thank you for reading and taking this journey with me.