20 years of blogging

Blog System/5 hasn’t always been called this way and it hasn’t been my first experience with blogging either. In fact, today marks the 20th anniversary of this publication in its various incarnations so it’s time for a bit of reflection.

Just to set context for when 20 years ago was: Windows XP was almost 3 years old, Ubuntu had just debuted, Apple computers were still PowerPC-based, Half Life 2 was about to launch, and Slashdot was the place to be instead of the yet-to-be-created Hacker News. As for myself, I was still in college, had copious amounts of free time, and was a really active contributor to NetBSD.

June 22, 2024 · Tags: blog, blogsystem5
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Hello, Blog System/5!

Blog System/5 is my new Substack publication in which I write about the variety of software and systems engineering topics that pique my interest. If that sounds too generic to you, it’s because it is: there are too many cool things to write about! And yes, this sounds exactly the same as this blog. Read on to understand the motivation behind the new publication and subscribe now to not miss a beat!

October 27, 2023 · Tags: blog, blogsystem5
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In-house email subscriptions

Fellow readers! The radio silence for the last two months has an explanation. I’ve been busy creating a custom email subscription service for this blog, all so that you can be notified about new posts without the noise added by intermediaries. This feature is built into a little Rust web service that already offered analytics, page comments and more, and that can be potentially integrated into arbitrary static websites. Read on for what was involved, stay tuned for a deep dive on the internals, and… upfront apologies if this first email does the wrong thing!

June 16, 2023 · Tags: blog, endtracker
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Comments are back and other news

Just a couple of weeks ago, I described my home-grown analytics service for this site. Today, I’m here to describe a couple of related updates: namely, the support for comments and the complete removal of client-side fingerprinting.

February 16, 2022 · Tags: blog, endtracker
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DIY web analytics

One thing that had been bothering me about my websites—including this blog, but especially when launching https://www.endbasic.dev/ just a few months ago—was this:

uBlock showing a warning that it blocked a tracker on the EndBASIC site.

A tracking warning. uBlock complained that my properties had one tracker. And it’s true they had just one: it was Google Analytics, or GA for short.

GA is the de-facto standard for web analytics: it is extremely powerful and ubiquitous. However, GA has grown exceedingly complicated, installs cookies (thus requiring the utterly annoying cookie warning in the EU), has issues with the GDPR, and, depending on how you look at it, is also very privacy invasive.

February 1, 2022 · Tags: blog, endtracker
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From FeedBurner to follow.it

An announcement that explains why this blog has had to migrate from FeedBurner-based email subscriptions to a new service offered by follow.it. If you were subscribed before, please read this; and if you weren’t, please consider subscribing now.

July 2, 2021 · Tags: blog
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What makes an article succeed (or not)?

This is what landing on the Hacker News front page does to your usually-dormant site:

Number of total daily visitors of this site over the last few days.

In other words, this is what the Windows Subsystem for Linux: The lost potential post caused:

a ridiculous jump from the usual ~80 visits per day to 6,000 on day one, 9,000 on day two, and 1,000 on day three;
200 comments on Hacker News in less than 24 hours and a ripple of discussions in Reddit and OSnews;
a very insightful chat with a long-term NTFS engineer on general system performance;
and an incredibly poor conversion rate with only 5 new Twitter followers and 3 new email subscribers.

To summarize: a one-off bump with no long-term engagement effects.

November 23, 2020 · Tags: blog
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From Jekyll to Hugo

It is done. This site is now powered by Hugo instead of Jekyll. It took me a full week’s worth of early mornings to achieve, but the results are great… internally, that is, because as a reader you should notice no changes other than minor style tweaks.

Performance differences

As of today, this site hosts 711 posts totaling 3.4MB of text. The style sheet is based on Bootstrap and is built from scratch using SASS.

February 24, 2018 · Tags: blog, writing
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Looking to replace Jekyll

Back in May 2015, I was lured to Medium by its simplicity and growing community, which resulted in me posting a bunch of articles there and enjoying every moment of it. But, eventually, I noticed that I was losing control of my content. So a year later, my experiments to create static homepage resulted in me moving from Blogger and Medium to a Jekyll-managed site.

Almost two years have passed since that migration and I can only count 7 miserable new posts. This ridiculously-low number, unfortunately, doesn’t track my willingness to write—but the friction to posting has become so high that I fear composing new essays.

February 19, 2018 · Tags: blog, writing
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The Medium experiment wrap-up

Eight months ago, I decided to try Medium as the platform on which to post my essays. Over this time I have published a handful of posts in there—8, to be precise, which is… a very shy number—but the results have been quite satisfactory: the WYSIWYG composer is excellent, the analytics tools are simple but to the point, the looks are great, and the community is nice (though I haven’t been able to tap into it just yet). But where have things failed?

January 28, 2016 · Tags: blog, markdown2social, writing
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Kyua gets its own blog

For the last couple of weeks, I have been pondering the creation of a Kyua-specific blog. And, after a lot of consideration, I have finally taken the plunge. Say hello to Engineering Kyua!

From now on, all Kyua-related posts (as well as ATF posts) will go to the new blog. I recommend you to subscribe to Engineering Kyua's Atom feed right now to not miss a beat! If you care enough about Kyua, that is...

I may still post Kyua-related stuff in here once in a while, but you should assume that all news and, in particular, weekly status reports will be sent to the new blog.

"Why?" Well, The Julipedia is supposed to be (and always has) my personal blog. Looking back at all the recent posts, they almost univocally are about Kyua and there is no personal content in them. In respect for the readers of this blog (who may not care about Kyua at all) and in order to attempt to give Kyua a more definite identity, it makes sense to move the posts to their own blog.

Also, by having a blog dedicated to Kyua, I will not feel uncomfortable about publishing weekly status reports again. I previously felt that they were adding too much noise to this blog, and is the main reason behind why I stopped posting them at some point. Weekly reports have their value, mostly to keep myself focused and to allow outsiders to know what the project is up to (particularly in a world of DVCSs, where code changes may be kept private for weeks at a time).

And you may wonder: "will you continue to post content here?" Sure I will, but I need ideas (suggestions welcome)! Today's social ecosystem makes it difficult for me to decide whether a post belongs in a blog, in Google+, in Twitter... and updating them all at once to provide the same content is pointless.

Here is my take: for most of the irrelevant stuff that one may want to share at a personal level (photos, videos, arbitrary thoughts), social networks seem to provide a better platform. The blog seems a place more suited for short essays that should be indexable and be accessible by users across the web; for example, these include how-tos, technical explanations for a particular concept, or opinion articles. And, finally, Twitter seems like the place to throw pointers to longer articles elsewhere and very short opinion comments. I think this summarizes pretty well what my current "practices" around these systems follow. And, as you can deduce, this also explains (as you have experienced) why the blog gets fewer content than ever because most things are better suited for a social network.

June 4, 2012 · Tags: blog, kyua
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Blog migrated to new Blogger beta

Blogger announced yesterday multiple improvements to their service. These are still in beta — as almost all other Google stuff, you know ;-) — and are being offered to existing users progressively. To my surprise, the option to migrate was available on my dashboard today so I applied for it; I was very interested in the post labelling feature.

The migration process has been flawless and trivial. After the change nothing seemed to have changed except for some minor nits in the UI. I looked around for the labels feature but discovered that it is only available once you migrate to the new "layouts system", an easier way to desing your blog's look.

The switch to layouts scared me a bit because I was afraid of not being able to integrate the Statcounter code back again. But after verifying that the change was reversible, I tried it. I can confirm that the new customization page is much, much easier to use than before, although still too limited (direct HTML editing is not available yet). Oh, and I seized the oportunity to switch to a slightly different theme (yes, it was available before).

Aside from that there are some new nice features such as RSS feeds (weren't they there before?), a better archive navigation (see the right bar), integration with Google accounts and many other things I'm surely missing.

Summarizing: It has taken a long while for the Google people to upgrade Blogger's service, but the wait has been worth it. Now more than ever, I don't regret migrating from Livejournal to this site almost a year ago.

August 16, 2006 · Tags: blog
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