Choices constrained by apparently trivial factors are not always bad

I registered this domain back in the mid-90s, but I didn’t use it for anything other than email for some years, since I had my university accounts on which I hosted personal stuff alongside my course materials and research projects, and this was perfectly sufficient. (I still have all my university pages safely archived, not that I expect to use them again – all coded in Notepad (I was a Windows user back then); the most sophisticated aspect of them was the extensive use of server-side includes.)

I put up my first set of personal pages on this domain about 10 years ago, with another hand-coded design (html, php and css then – the Web had come on a lot since the 90’s and I had tried to keep up), and they were fine for a good while until the ascendancy of handheld devices, when the need for a responsive design became impossible to ignore. I learned Bootstrap, of course, but my sense of design being not much better than rudimentary, it became clear that a template from someone who understood how to lay stuff out on a screen (with multiple different viewports) was essential. “Responsive web design”, they call it. Oh – I was desperate to avoid WordPress too, as I wanted to be able to tinker with my website “under the bonnet”.

If you’ve ever gone through the process of searching for “free website templates” (or some such variant of the term) on Google, you’ll know what a bewildering amount of stuff there is out there. Not wanting a blog, or an online shop or any of the other designs offering multiple bells and whistles made it slightly simpler, but finding something which was visually appealing and which offered the opportunity to customise it to exactly what I wanted, together with some likelihood of forward development potential to fit what I might want to do in the future, took a surprising long time.

Finally, I lit upon the design you see here, for which I take no credit – the site is based on the Noah template by Aigars Silkalns, which you can find on his Colorlib website.

For some time there was a single page here which did everything I wanted it to do. Then, in 2023, I did a talk on AI and education at the Science Museum in London, and it seemed sensible to put the text of that here too, along with accompanying references and other related material.

Forward to late summer 2024, and I felt the need to write again. Nothing (I reasoned at that point) long-winded, but I had a bunch of scribblings that I wanted to release into the wild, and putting them on LinkedIn or some other social media website (Facebook? Surely not!) didn’t appeal. And so this little section of musings, in its own subdirectory, slowly came to life.

But what to call it? This was where my choice of template (and my reluctance to tamper with the aesthetics of its design, which I like very much) produced the constraint referred to in the title of this piece.

“Thoughts & Opinions”, “Musings” and other such titles were too long to display properly at the top of the page. So I needed something shorter, and preferably not more than four characters. Casting round over several weeks, my mind came up with the word “wot”. I don’t know why. I was passingly familiar with the first line of the poem “My Garden” -
A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!
– which I discovered is by the 19th century schoolmaster and poet Thomas Edward Brown (Oxford double first and fellow of Oriel, so no slouch academically) – and in which the word “wot” carries the present tense of “wit” (to know). So "God knows". And of course, "wot" - as any fule kno - is also an expression of surprise, outrage, disbelief or other kind of outburst online. I liked this combination of knowing and reaction.

So Wot it is, then.