I had a blog for a long time. I wrote the first post at 2005 and the last one at 2010. Blog was written in Czech language and the topics varied from Programming, through Linux, films, music, to various jottings about my daily life. I had covered my first serious attempt to quit smoking (which failed after 6 months), projects I had been working and so on. Though I wasn’t the most productive writer, yet I had managed to write over 100 posts during those 5 years.
Sunsetting the old blog
But after 8 years, the blog is outdated from many points of view. I don’t maintain the projects I had been maintaining before. I don’t work as front-end JavaScript developer and there’s no need to educate people about JavaScript, because it became mainstream. I changed as a person and I actually feel a bit ashamed for some naive things that I wrote in some personal posts, I quit smoking 3 years ago without any need to write about it publicly.
Updating and taking care of WordPress is annoying. It manages to do its updates automatically, but still it’s not exactly the most secure piece of software and you never know if your site isn’t already hacked. Then there’s GDPR - a legislation that I welcome and I feel is important, but I don’t really want to spend time analysing what actually Wordpress stores and how to make it more privacy friendly.
So I decided I will throw away the old blog. I already archived my posts, and I am going to delete it and redirect it here, to my personal website.
But, wait… where to write stuff?
But I have been feeling a tiny urge to write some things to my blog recently. I fell for a new hobby in the last few months: hobby electronics. Playing with Arduino, micro controllers and so on. I have some projects in progress and some struggles here and there and I would like to write about those. Why?
- It’s a good language practice. I am not English native speaker so it’s always good to use the language more.
- It’s a nice way to wrap-up my projects. It will force me to finalize schematics, write down bill of materials and such.
- I feel it might be a nice addition to my online presence, alongside to my profiles on Github, Stackoverlow, Linkedin, and Twitter. Because I am looking for opportunities in international teams in Germany or even in the whole Europe, and I am sure that 8 years old posts about JavaScript written in Czech wouldn’t help me at all.
Rise of a new blog
Therefore, I created this new blog. No Wordpress of course. I went with Jekyll instead. Jekyll generates static website in my computer which I can then upload to my VPS. So there is no CMS to hack and things are much safer. I am trying to make the website as much privacy friendly as possible. No cookies, very limited traffic analysis (anonymised IPs, no cookies, no user ids, respecting Do-Not-Track) using self-hosted installation of Matomo to avoid any sharing of data with third parties. That also means no like buttons, embedded Youtube videos, Imgur galleries and of course no comments. I might find some solution for comments in the future, though.
I’ll see how often I’ll be able to put something up, however there’s an old school Atom feed for anyone interested.