I’ve been “on the net” since 1997. A lot has changed in that time, and a lot has stayed the same. I’ve tried blogging platforms with bells and whistles, but always come back to simple hand-edited pages. I think, now I’ve found the best system that works for me. Staic site generators that allow you to write in markdown using the text editor of your choice, and then convert your prose to html ready for publishing. I’ve never found a web editor that I enjoyed using as much as I like typing in the terminal (xterm + vim, ftw), and while hand-coding html is just fine, sometimes it can be a bit tedious. The advent of ‘structured text’ like markdown and restructured text also make things pretty easy now. You can have a file that looks good in your text editor and also looks good on the web.

Since, I’ve had “content” online since 1997, I decided to see if I could find it and bring it all together under one roof. In the process, I found lots of old posts that I had completely forgotten about, and decided to re-post them here. I’ve culled a fair amount of the junk, and only brought the stuff that I still find interesting. You can still find the junk out there if you really want to. I’ve preserved the original post dates where they existed, and have only edited the content so it looks fine in markdown. I haven’t changed any of the words (except where needed to protect the innocent).

It was really nice to revisit 20 years of my life as seen through my own thoughts and words, and get a chance to relive some of my experiences.

Past homes (most recent first)⌗

  • dev.to/gabeguz dev.to is probably my favourite blogging platform so far. I’ll likely continue to syndicate my dev centric content there for awhile.

  • medium I had a brief stint on medium, but I disagree fundamentally with their walled garden approach so I closed my account.

  • gabe.svbtle.com I wanted to try out svbtle, as I liked the clean look and a few people who’s blogs I followed were there. It’s nice overall, no nonsense and stays out of your way so you can write. The things I didn’t like so much are that it’s not open source, and there’s no easy way to get your posts out of the system.

  • guzman-nunez.com After trying the database backed dynamic blog thing for a time, I decided I didn’t need all the bells and whistles and so just went back to hand-editing my site. I didn’t need much in the way of formatting, and plain old html was more than adequate for my needs. Markdown et al didn’t exist yet, or I’m sure I would have used that.

  • devnull - I went through a few different blogging/publishing platforms here, most notably plone, and zope. Surprisingly, I never tried one of the php backed blogging platforms even though by this time I was mostly doing php at my dayjob. While they were all fine at what they did, I didn’t really need the complexity for a simple blog, and the ocasiaonal posts about travelling.

  • www.acusd.edu ‘97 and www.acusd.edu ‘01 - My first home on the internet. This was all hand edited html, a few simple pages with text and some pictures. I didn’t really use the space much, but I had a few book lists and some articles I wrote for humor hosted here as well as some papers I had written for school. This is where I first learned about vi(1) and emacs(1), and cgi-bin and public_html and ~username addresses. My first real usage of a unix like system (Solaris).

New Home⌗

My new home is, as you’ve probably guessed, here. This particular site is written in markdown with ViM, converted to html with Hugo and hosted on a VPS at Vultr running OpenBSD and the httpd(8) webserver.