Software, blogging, estrangement

Befuddled by FOSS

The new woman who is set to replace me when I retire in a couple of months seemed a little surprised today. First of all there was a screaming match going on in the next room over the submission of a fundraising proposal. I wasn’t paying much attention to it as I was busy trying to explain some things about the job (maybe that surprised her too). Then, when I got into explaining about Piwigo (the photo gallery software we use), and kept praising the recent changes introduced by the “developer”, she asked me what I meant by “a developer.” She is used to big companies with hundreds of developers, not free open source software. She said she didn’t feel safe otherwise because “What would happen if the developer goes away?”

So I pointed out that Google (whose software we also use) is guilty of dropping so many applications – just yesterday, I had mentioned another one (Currents) that they are dropping. And I pointed out that if Gmail one day becomes unprofitable, Google could drop that too. “And look at Twitter…” And then, I said, it isn’t so strange to be using something that doesn’t have a powerful company behind it, because the same is true of many essential parts on which the whole structure of the internet is built! Finally, I showed her the Piwigo website, which says that the application has been around for 20 years and is used by numerous universities, etc.

This is really insignificant

I think that most people with the audacity to publish what they write probably think that they have some essential contribution to make, or something important to tell or sell humanity, and usually this is true. So I feel a heavy responsibility to explain that none of this is true here.

Hardly anybody reads this stuff and they have no good reason to do so. This is, rather, a compendium of unoriginal reflections on the life and times of a forgetable nobody. Whatever ideas are expressed here will certainly have been stated more cogently by people with greater intelligence. If you haven’t come across the ideas already elsewhere, you are welcome to restate them in a better way, without credit or, instead, to use them as a prime example of flawed understanding, with or without credit. flags

Those flags…

With the above thoughts in mind, I listened this evening to a podcast on the Haaretz site by journalist and TV anchor woman Ilana Dayan. She felt that the judicial reform that is going forward is so significant that she had to step out of her usual role as a presenter of content and to analyze its deep negative impact on Israeli democracy. She made me aware both of my extreme ignorance, and of how much of an outsider I am to Israeli society and culture. Her presentation was erudite and informed. But it also had the essential quality of issuing from an insider. Her gut feelings and trust in Israeli society are based on her familiarity with the way things work and the way Israelis think.

I lack all of that. I can’t and don’t feel like an Israeli. I’m not even sure that I know what other Israelis, especially those who are involved in politics, are really feeling. I simply know that I’ve emotionally rejected the reality in which they feel at home. I cannot sympathize with a national group that, on the one hand, is proud of its democratic institutions while, on the other hand, it denies basic rights to Palestinians. Somehow Ilana Dayan, who, as an investigative journalist, has a much keener understanding of how the system works, and how it is skewed against Palestinians, can juggle that, and still come out thinking that she is blessed to live in this country.

There was another Israeli journalist, Yossi Gurwitz, whose early death was discovered on Monday. In his later years, he became an anti-zionist, called for BDS, castigated religion and the state. Yet I somehow feel that even he was speaking out of the Israeli experience; existentially linked to the Israel he rejected.

The rejection of an insider is different from the rejection of an outsider. I’m an outsider to Israel as I’m an outsider to the other countries I have lived. I’m a stranger to the national life of those countries as well as to their institutions, such as their academic life, culture, news media and other facets of civilization. Wherever I go, I live on the outskirts, and without the least regret.

My experience is not unique – it’s surely commonplace. Perhaps even the majority of people, or a growing number of them, are rootless in a similar way. If I’m more aware of my position, or am more self-reflective about it, it is probably because I have lived so long in a country that is like Israel, which places a high value on the nurturing of its national identity.

Diary

There’s something about social media that it’s both a time-suck and an energy-suck. I’ve been so busy with it lately that I have not found the time or the energy for my blog. Not that I have been active on social media: that would not be true. It’s more that I have been either reading timelines, or evaluating and playing with its possibilities. Or installing, or reinstalling, and not getting very far with anything.

I’ve been busy both with Epicyon and with Hubzilla, and, as always my interest is more in the possibilities and capabilities of a system than actually using it. I’m simply not very good at being very social on social media, so I end up following smart people with interesting things to say; the ones who are least likely to follow me back, in other words, because they already have thousands of followers.

However interesting it is to play around with social media, blogging has greater importance. It’s the place where one can record one’s thoughts or place images that will have more permanence. So it’s unfortunate that people who spend / waste time on social media often end up neglecting their blog. I don’t want to become one of those people.

My blogging system lacks a way to keep the blog updated when I’m not at my computer. That’s a bit of a problem for when I contemplate traveling just with my phone. It isn’t a problem entering text on the phone. I have a nice, portable keyboard for that. Today while I was awaiting the family to emerge from a children’s play, I was able to sit in a coffee shop and type away on my keyboard, using my phone as a screen. I have Orgzly in my phone and it’s great for taking notes or writing longer texts. So it’s possible to use it also for blogging, and then sync it later to my blog when I’m on a computer. I could also use Epicyon to write blog posts, and later move them back to my blog. I suppose these methods are the best solutions.

One day, perhaps, I’ll have a linux phone where I can do exactly what I want. Perhaps computers as such will be unnecessary, and the phone will present a complete solution.

This post was written in the Emacs terminal mode. It’s the first time I’ve done that (normally I use the GUI version). But the GUI version does not have a huge advantage over the terminal. Not that I’ve memorized all the emacs commands, but there’s a menu system and I have my notes.

Interesting links

Les bonnes pratiques d’écoconception pour WordPress

Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

What is the small web, by Aral Balkan “The Small Web is the Single Tenant Web Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of ‘users’. When we refer to people, we call them people.”

But he also raised a concern today that seems to be valid: that on the Fediverse, it is quite likely that, as with email, there will be a tendency by large servers to block small instances. With email, this is due to the prevalence of spam. With the Fediverse, it would be due to the challenges of moderation. It’s easy to block right-wing white supremicists, for example when they are all on a couple of large servers, which can easily be blocked. It would be much harder to accomplish if they were on single or small instances, with just a few users. So one could imagine a situation where an instance could decide to block everyone who isn’t on a few well-known, well-moderated instances.

We’re just at the beginning of popular mainstream adoption of the Fediverse. It’s an exciting time, but it’s still very unclear how its future will evolve.

Favorite books of 2022

Now’s the time when lists are being made of popular books and popular TV shows, movies etc., so it’s a good time to make wish lists. Maria Popova has a book list with many promising titles.

The tathatā of time-wasting

Usually when we choose the title of an article, or a network, or a domain name, we want something that will express the essence, the spirit, the suchness or tathatā of the thing we are naming. Or we are being humorous. There’s a new instance on the Fediverse called the “godpod”, whose owner has chosen a god-avatar for himself and makes bold declarations, such as that it was a mistake of his not to include mastodons in the ark. Well, “godpod” has a certain ring to it. Whereas Mike McGirvin – the author of several social networks and social networking protocols and of attempts to bridge between them and others, was expressing the suchness of his despair when naming his instance “unfediverse”.

When I chose the name for my own domain it was also with a certain irony. Vikshepa is usually a negative trait in Brahmanism and Buddhism. It implies mental confusion and the tendency of the mind to run towards distraction. We sit down for meditation and instantly the mind rebels and runs all over the place: anywhere but where we are attempting to focus it.

It seemed to me when choosing that name that it is much the same with the internet. We sit down at our keyboard intending to write something, or read one thing, and instantly we are swept on the current of some new developing news story. It’s especially true when we look at microblogs. It’s like willful distraction. Or, if we personally get involved in the discussion, it can be much worse. It’s not for nothing that people call Twitter the “hellsite” – though it’s psychologically interesting that we keep going back to it for more.

So, when thinking for a name for a subdomain for a new personal social networking instance, I am thinking along the lines of “antisocial.vikshepa.com”. I know that usually people are choosing something benign like “social.mastodon.org”. But maybe another ironic name to match the vikshepa is better suited? I wouldn’t be the first to use such a title. Maciej Ceglowski called his Pinboard.in site a place for “antisocial bookmarking”, when his main competitors like Delicious, were calling their sites “social bookmarking sites” – with the idea that people would share their bookmarks for a certain subject.

But why a name like “antisocial” for a personal fediverse instance? Because there is something vaguely antisocial about doing one’s own personal microblog server, rather than choosing a mass-user instance with a few hundred thousand soles. The instance’s public timeline, for one thing would be decidedly dull.

Unless one is a celebrity or an authority with something interesting to say on a certain subject, there is also something vaguely antisocial about blogging itself, or at least thrusting one’s blog before the eyeballs of others. Even bestselling authors of novels, for example, can be tedious writers of superfluous essays. I was recently listening to a podcast of an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who spoke about this. He said that although sometimes novelists bring out an anthology of their essays, he was not planning to do so, because he didn’t believe that essay writing was his forte. Indeed, I remember being disappointed by the weekly Guardian column of the Italian novelist Elena Ferente. It continued for a year or so, before she or the Guardian had had enough. It was, I think, a wise decision to stop, because however good a novelist she proved herself to be a poor columnist. At least, that was my impression.

In any case, as I was saying, there is something impertinent about offering to occupy a reader’s time with matters that are often quite inconsequential – to them. To me it might be important to write, even at length. But there’s no guarantee that others will find it the same. So it’s at least as impertinent as trolling someone on Twitter or its alternatives, or not trolling – just being a bore, an asshole, a time waster.

For me, writing is an exercise in trying to see the world in a new way. It comes across, maybe, in some of the posts, but certainly not in all of them. And even when the exercise works for me, it may not for others.

Changes in perception occur sometimes in a split second. The best composers of tweets are occasionally able to summon up such a change deftly, in one witty line. Twitter, with its original 128 characters was really an art form, like Haiku. Not everyone could tweet well. But some were great at it. There should be a book titled “Tweets that shook the world”.

Mastodon, and Twitter itself, have become such a mess due to their wider range of word limits and long and short utterances, but especially those interminable threads. How many jokes can we hear about Elon Musk, or ironic statements about his shocking behaviour, before they cease to be entertaining? We got the message long ago. It’s turning a medium intended for short, pithy expressions of thought, into the opposite. Reading through the thread is as bad as reading a book of memorable quotes from cover to cover. We were hoping to remember a few of them – but eventually they merge together into a kind of wise-ass drone and we remember nothing. I used to have a book of Hallmark Haiku. It was better to read two or three poems, and then put the book down.

Books, and essays, don’t always achieve their effect within a few syllables. Sometimes a novel requires its thousand pages, and sometimes an essay requires its thousand lines. A friend, on reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance said that it was good but that the writer could have achieved the same effect with a much shorter book. Maybe. But for me that book is ingrained in my memory due to its length, and the gradual unfolding of its events. Mistry has written shorter books, and short stories, but nothing quite compares to Balance in its effect, which is cumulative, building from chapter to chapter.

There are master-essayists like the 19th century writer Ruskin, who were wonderful thanks to the richness and colour of their prose. It isn’t so much what he says, but the way that he says it, that gives value to the essay, and becomes the reason we continue to read those essays today.

Anyway, time to go back to bed. I’ve wasted some time. Hopefully only my own time.

Blog backlog up to date

I have successfully passed all of the home-spun html entries from recent months into org-static-blog, meaning that I now have a continuous archive for the last three years. The ones from before that time can be found on WordPress. I don’t plan to move more of them.

A website should be more that a blog, however – I would like to add new features as time goes by. My biggest dilemma is whether to bother with adding some sort of fediverse or social networking to the site; it’s somewhat of a distraction, and it isn’t really possible to do it in basic html like the rest of the site. The simplest format is Bob Mottram’s Epicyon, if I want to get that working. But it looks like it would be necessary to add NGINX to the server. That’s possible too, it seems: one can have more than a single web servre protocol running on a server.

A Life Full of Holes, by Paul Bowles

I finished that today. It isn’t really clear to me whether he wrote the book under a fictional pseudonym, or whether the Magrebi storyteller was for real. Anyway, it’s a great book, written in a very original style. I could easily imagine a Bedouin shepherd relating the story. It’s poignant and creates great sympathy for the narrator. Usually a book like this, written by a western writer would be suspect of disguised racism, condescension or orientalism, but it’s not what I feel here. He doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the westerners, “the Nazarenes”, who appear in the book, and doesn’t romanticize the locals – mainly you think that he’s telling it like it is. I think it most reminded me of a Nectar in a Sieve, a book by the Indian writer Kamala Markandaya that I read years ago, though A Life Full of Holes is less tragic.

Bad News

The Guardian brings today terrible stories of Ukraine, of Uyghurs, of Sudan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. The world is full of sorrow. So let’s party?

That wouldn’t be for me to say, since troubles are more likely to make me turn inward. But either way, this is not the “Let’s fix things” mentality that we probably need.

Hubzilla | state of the web

Growing this site

I haven’t had much time for blogging lately, but, in my free time I have been tidying up my Hubzilla site and making various improvements. One intended improvement resulted in the accidental deletion of one of my wikis, but it was not such a significant loss. After going back and forth on the question of how to collect web links – such as for comment in blogging. Hubzilla’s bookmarks module looks like it still needs some work, though it is very easy to share bookmarks to it, via a browser bookmarklet. See my channel timeline for a discussion on the pros and cons of the system. In the meantime, I will be using another Hubzilla module.

Along the way, I discovered that sharing from the photos module can result in disaster (by sharing a bunch of uploaded photos from the photos module, each photo becomes a separate status post – eek!)

Chris Trottier has a short article [1] on the imperfections of the Fediverse as a decentralized social network, and why it is still the most viable solution that is currently available. He says that although better protocols exist for decentralized social networking, the Fediverse is currently the only one (other than email – which has become increasingly centralized) that has sufficient engagement and momentum. As for me, while it would be possible for a system like Hubzilla to incorporate social networking via XMPP (the protocol is already supported by Hubzilla), I think it would not be possible to do all that I do in Hubzilla with a protocol entirely based on XMPP.

I too have various gripes with the Fediverse. I was unable to subscribe to Trottier’s Pixelfed account through Hubzilla. And I discovered today that while I am unable to subscribe to any Diaspora account, they can subscribe to me. I have yet to see whether Diaspora posts will show up in my stream. The web

There were a couple of other interesting articles on the web lately. We discovered that DuckDuckGo is filtering out search results that reference the Pirate Bay and YouTubeDL [2].

DDG also announced lately that they will filter Russian “disinformation” from their results. SearX is the engine I try to use, but the Disroot instance that I use seems to depend mainly on results from the other big search engines, which do the same filtering.

There are more search engines mentioned, but many of these are “not supported”. On the Disroot instance, or completely?

Anil Dash has a positive piece, “A web renaissance” [3]

“Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again.

“… now, the entire ecosystem has seen that there’s no safety in being subject to the whims of the tech giants. Some don’t like having to pay to promote their content online. Some don’t like being deranked by capricious algorithms. Some don’t like being on a treadmill of constantly trying to optimize for search engines. Some don’t like being on platforms that promoted hate or abuse. Everyone has something that frustrates them.

“On your own site, though, under your own control, you can do things differently. Build the community you want. I’m not a pollyanna about this; people are still going to spend lots of times on the giant tech platforms, and not everybody who embraces the open web is instantly going to become some huge hit. Get your own site going, though, and you’ll have a sustainable way of being in control of your own destiny online.”

Books

I have decided to give George R.R. Martin a rest, or put him permanently to rest, for similar reasons that I eventually gave up on Gene Wolfe. Their world-building and force of imagination deserves praise, but, they demand too much of our time. Though their gift does not fail them, artificial worlds eventually come up against certain limits, like the hero of “The Truman Show”.

I feel a need to spend time with something else. Candidates are the writings of Christopher Isherwood and more Patrick Modiano.

Links

Why I’m all in with the Fediverse even though I have gripes

https://blog.peerverse.space/why-im-all-in-with-the-fediverse-even-though-i-have-gripes/

DuckDuckGo Removes Pirate Sites and YouTube-DL from Its Search Results

https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-removes-pirate-sites-and-youtube-dl-from-its-search-results-220415/

A Web Renaissance

https://anildash.com/2022/04/13/a-web-renaissance/

Unlike Dash, who advocates benefiting from new web technologies, here is a piece that speaks out for keeping things as simple as possible, and make sites that are designed to outlast the latest technological whims.

This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

Indeed there was a time not so long ago that every site seemed to depend upon Flash. What a horror that was.

A walk | the blog | browsers | Signal messenger | links

I have been feeling a need for a bit of seclusion lately. Maybe because in Israel-Palestine the holiday season with its seasonal tensions is on us again. I went for a walk in the woods and fields today and ran into a battalion of boy/girl scouts. One of them – maybe their security detail – was waiting for me as I approached, with questions about where I lived, whether I was Jewish, how relations are between Jews and Arabs there – he got mostly a stony silence from me as I marched through. Luckily I’m harmless.

Then I found a quiet spot to read Ibn Arabi and do a bit of writing. It’s a lovely season and was a beautiful day; the wild chrysanthemums are blooming and the thistles are starting to flower too. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera or a phone. Blogging

I have accumulated several issues to handle in the blog, when I find time/feel like doing something about it. I already mentioned making the font sizes larger. Yesterday I found a couple more articles on static blogs, and one of these mentioned Google Lighthouse – a Chrome extension which is an even greater stickler than the tests that I have been using. It discovered a couple of things to improve. the SEO rating – where my blog suffers most – does not interest me, and could never be very high when I have included “No Index, No follow” meta, but there are a couple of other things to take care of. Regarding RSS, either I will learn to write my own, or I will depend on WP, which I have been using for archiving in any case. There may even be a way of using WP solely for RSS, with no front-end blog interface – I will have to check that.

I was looking again at Genesis in Lagrange. Because it is solely text-based, habitually lacklustre textual blogs seem even less inspiring to me when viewed in Genesis. One day I might decide to use it, but not now. Although I’m not a particularly graphic-oriented person, I do find that the likelihood of my reading a blog is somewhat influenced by appearances, and I have an unproven hunch that this is true of many people.

“My stack will outlive yours” https://blog.steren.fr/2020/my-stack-will-outlive-yours/

“My Static Blog Publishing Setup and an Apology to RSS Subscribers” https://tdarb.org/blog/my-static-blog-publishing-setup.html

Browsers

I found a few interesting articles to check out on browsers. One blogger insists that Pale Moon and related UXP browsers are the way to go, for web privacy. I find that I am staying with SeaMonkey except in cases where a website patently won’t work.

Pale Moon Hardening Guide https://blackgnu.net/palemoon-hardening.htmlUXP

UXP Browser Bundle https://albusluna.com/uxp/index.html

UXP Browser https://docs.temenos.com/ndocs/Solutions/Technology/Interaction_Framework/uxp/Browser/uxp/uxp.htm

Signal

I have stopped using Signal, because I don’t trust it; but I see that Russians are trusting it more and more, among other means, to get around censorship.

How Russian citizens evade Putin’s censorship – Protocol https://www.protocol.com/russian-internet-crackdown

Here are a couple of other articles regarding Signal:

Tell HN: iOS Signal eats your disk space | Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30972546

Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal – The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/10/22876891/signal-ceo-steps-down-moxie-marlinspike-encryption-cryptocurrency Other interesting links

Leave your shoes outdoors, these scientists say – CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/11/world/shoes-home-contaminants-scn-partner/index.html

I Liked The Idea Of Carbon Offsets, Until I Tried To Explain It https://climateer.substack.com/p/avoided-emissions?s=r

Blogging in the mainstream

I’m not sure how popular blogging is these days; I’ve read about a mass turning away from traditional blogging in favor of Facebook. My own evidence is only anecdotal. I find quite often when going through my bookmarks that blogs I had once visited now lie dormant, neglected and forgotten, or worse, show a 404 error code.

But together with this, popular news sites like the Guardian are now full of articles that read more like blog posts, and would be better suited to the blogosphere, instead of taking up space for the news I’d gone looking for.

Last week when I came to the end of a glowingly positive take on a just-terminated Netflix science fiction show – one which I had given up on after a single episode – I was just thinking well maybe I hadn’t given the show enough time, when I glanced at the talkbacks. The first commenter said that this show was truly juvenile rubbish and that if he encountered more stories like this in the Guardian he would cancel his sub. And I thought wow – I still have that gullible mentality that if something is appearing in a reputable journal like the Guardian, then it must have some sort of value. But actually, this more critical reader was dead right. The story was just a shitpost. It belonged to the democratic blogosphere, where everyone can post, and we keep our noses primed accordingly.

So that’s what I did today when reading a blog-type story about coffee – also in the Guardian, called: My neverending search for the perfect cup of coffee. Perfect blog material indeed, with lines like “The perfect cup of coffee is like the perfect lipstick: a quest that will end only with your death.” Which isn’t strictly grammatical. It’s a pleasant post, though you don’t actually learn anything (partly because she’s lazy about hyperlinks).

I love my blackened stove-top Bialetti for reasons to do with nostalgia and all-round stylishness, but it makes pretty mud-like coffee: good for days when you’re knackered, but very bad indeed when the last thing you need is to be wired like Frankenstein.

It doesn’t matter – it’s an engaging and enjoyable read – perfect blog material. Just a pity I’m reading it in the Guardian. I could be moseying around Medium or WordPress instead.

But maybe I’m being too narrow in my views. I think as I’m growing older I’m becoming dogmatically taxonomic. Hey Bob, you’ve misfiled that in the wrong folder again and assigned the wrong file name. And how can I relate to the subject of your email, if you’ve written about it in a reply to something completely different?

There’s a legitimate middle ground of excellent themed webzines that are entirely blogs. Like 972mag.com or Scroll.in. There are dozens of these. I don’t think many people go to them with the same religious regularity that they go to news sites. It’s more likely that someone recommends a story on Twitter of Facebook, and they follow a link, and then perhaps find themselves reading more stories. And one of the reasons that I’m coming across these blog type stories on the news sites, rather than in the blog venues, is that I’m not so much into social media lately, and have been neglecting my news-feed aggregators.

TLDR; – hard to say; it’s like that story about coffee. Just a few reflections.

blogging

It looks like nice work that Aral Balkan has been doing on his Indie web server. I ‘m not sure I believe any longer in the open web and like Hubzilla’s model of privacy and access restrictions, but otherwise I might go for it. I found yesterday that there are plug ins that enable one to convert WordPress sites to static websites. I was thinking of importing my blog in that way to Hubzilla. But I’m also tired of this work of endless archiving and preservation. For me the value in writing is more in the process of it. It allows me to develop my thinking and imagination. Afterwards I rarely look at what I’ve written. So I wonder what is the value of trying to preserve it. Most of what I write is anyway in long hand, in Moleskines and Boleskines (cheap imitation made in Auroville).

Sites and blogs are mainly about buying and selling

There are a few altruistic souls who maintain websites as a service; a few persons that just like to write, but mostly what I see on the web is that it is being used for self-promotion. I suppose it’s understandable. People, if they enjoy writing at all, mostly write to their friends, and for that they don’t need websites. There is social media, messengers and what have you. So the open web becomes a marketplace.

Lately I have been growing bored with even my alternative social media. Sometimes it’s nice to feel that others are seeing one’s content; yet just as people are lazy about writing, they tend to be lazy about reading, or even viewing material produced by others. And this is understandable too.

Initially, or each time I return to social media, I tend to share more in the beginning, till gradually it peters off. Eventually I end up mainly commenting or sharing what others have shared. It gets a bit stale. I do enjoy the alternative social media as a source of new information.

Sometimes I’ve permitted Google and search engines to include my content, and at other periods I’ve used the noindex nofollow flags. But for the greater part of its existence, the blog has been private or undiscoverable.

So why, in fact, maintain a blog, other than for the perfectly legitimate purpose of self-promotion? I think a blog can be a place where one can broadcast, in a non-intrusive way, what one feels, thinks, believes in, is going through, has experienced, wishes to relate, etc. It is not “in your face” like social media. Indeed it is so far removed from being “in your face” that it is likely that no one ever sees it. But it’s out there none the less.

So, here is my blog, my stash of thoughts, ruminations, feelings and reminiscences. Boring or interesting, common or unusual, uniquely my own in their combination, whatever.

Moved blog again

This blog goes back to 2003, though I’ve made most of the early posts private. Over this period it’s been on various blogging platforms on a number of hosts. Sometimes I’ve taken it offline, or marked the whole thing as private. I also do quite a lot of writing offline, in text files or in paper notebooks. For the last few months I’ve been doing the latter. Then I learned about Nearlyfreespeech.com, and decided to move it there. It was a little hard to set up, but certainly wasn’t the hardest hosting arrangement I’ve struggled with, and the transfer went smoothly. I thought about buying a Genesis theme that I fancied, then decided to use Weaver Extreme. Weaver really offers a flexible and easy framework and is fine especially for the minimalistic look I want, with a separation between different post categories. For now, I’ve removed the photo albums I’d started to establish, in order to keep storage space down and the hosting cheap. For now, I’m happy with the result. I’ll probably do a couple of other things later, like adding a Let’s Encrypt certificate.