blog - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

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
Continue reading (about 3 minutes)

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
Continue reading (about 5 minutes)

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
Continue reading (about 4 minutes)

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.

February 1, 2022 · Tags: blog, endtracker
Continue reading (about 13 minutes)

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
Continue reading (about 2 minutes)

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.

November 23, 2020 · Tags: blog
Continue reading (about 11 minutes)

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
Continue reading (about 6 minutes)

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
Continue reading (about 8 minutes)

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).

January 28, 2016 · Tags: blog, markdown2social, writing
Continue reading (about 5 minutes)

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.

June 4, 2012 · Tags: blog, kyua
Continue reading (about 3 minutes)

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.

August 16, 2006 · Tags: blog
Continue reading (about 2 minutes)