about

This blog operates under these principles ↓

Freedom of speech is the right to communicate one’s opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or censorship. The term freedom of expression is sometimes used synonymously, but includes any act of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas—regardless of the dinosaur used.

Privacy ↓

/me does NOT track, log, spy on, or in any way remain aware of the user’s presence on this site.

This blog is hosted using third-party tech, currently:

Where /me is neither Controller nor Processor. Their rules apply.

Comments? ↓

This is a statically built site, and I don’t particularly fancy plugging in Disqus or any third-party service like that—but you may use GitHub’s “issues” device to express your thoughts.

Me? ↓

Videographer, Linux enthusiast, Blender noob, kind of into web pages. Always wanted to fly. Accidental impressionist and post-gravitational artist.

Tinkering and development (very old, but keeping this text here for historical purposes) ↓

I went through this (running away from WordPress): ↓

Built a blog from scratch (with a Bash engine—it was slow, but kinda worked) and actually had a nice search-engine-like index.
Realized that without some sort of web interface, writing blogs would be really boring and slow…
Took a long pause, almost went back to WordPress.
Returned to the drawing board and did some research on how people blogged in 2015/2016.
After reading about Jekyll and similar solutions, discovered a third-party service called Tinypress that could post to a GitHub-hosted Jekyll page.
Thought about writing a Jekyll template from scratch—got bored, since it’s not just about Jekyll, but also building a mobile-friendly site < more than I was prepared to deal with.
Evil hackish plans grew; decided to go with a “do it fast to get something working, fix it later” approach. < It went really, really fast from that point on.
Found the Lanyon theme, uploaded it, and added some posts using Tinypress.
Modified the theme slightly > at this point there was a working/online blog without even running Jekyll offline on my machine: https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2016/01/02/1st-tinypress-post/
Realized Tinypress has bugs and lacks features. Concluded that with some workarounds, it’s still good enough for scribble posts, which can later be fixed offline with a real text editor—or maybe GitHub’s online one. < 99% of my posts are quick scribbles anyway, so no big deal.

Edit: Tinypress was replaced with Prose.io.
Edit 2: Nowadays it’s a script called ‘newPost’ and Vim/Geany.

Annoyed by Jekyll’s idea of “front matter” (can’t this be automatic or what…?), but eventually realized that included metadata is actually a good thing—posts are engine-independent in the long run. GitHub understands front matter to some extent.
Edit: Prose.io handles front matter automagically if configured correctly.
Actually installed Jekyll offline to do some more problematic element positioning and other theme hacks.

Cons: ↓

Google is slow to index the site, so my “Google this page” thing is kinda useless.
Edit: This is probably because I don’t have a top-level domain.
Slightly complicated posting (compared to WordPress). For example, no server-side image resizing.

Pros: ↓

Since I use Git, my site is fully backed up on multiple machines.
Hosted by someone else, so I don’t have to deal with boring server security.
(Should be easy to regenerate and upload to any server if GitHub drops it.)