House keeping a blog, a decade later
This blog is fairly static by design, minimalistic, and simple, but it's not immune to changes that affect the end user: I've added printing, dark mode, topics, and so on.
Pictured: Examples of the random taglines
- My contacts page uses cryptography to encode the email address, and a simple problem now reveals it. This has already resulted in a dramatic reduction in spam. It's not bot-proof, as anything that renders out the page could defeat my solution, but it creates a barrier that the page requires rendering out in full and an interaction, making it far more costly.
- I've updated to jQuery Slim. Sadly, the fitVid.js used for YouTube embeds requires jQuery. At some point, I'll rewrite it to pure JS and completely abandon jQuery. jQuery Slim shaves off about 20k of a page load.
- The tagline now changes randomly. It's brain-dead simple JavaScript, but it should inject a bit more whimsy into the site. There are about 50 slogans in total. My long-standing tagline, "Adventures of a Front End Architect," was something I punched in nearly a decade ago. At the time, it seemed fine, but I grew to find it a bit "cringe," as the kids say.
- My last several posts have been adapted from YouTube videos. This trend is sure to continue, as it makes sense to double-dip on my content. People can engage with my content however they prefer, whether via video or blog.
I missed an important milestone, but my blog crossed a remarkable anniversary in early 2023, ten years. I backed off posting in late 2022, realizing how my content would only be mined, stolen, and regurgitated by AI without attribution. Ironically, YouTube is what brought me back to the blog, realizing a small but not insignificant amount of my traffic could be attributed to my blog. Google might be eating its own tail with AI content, but it's still directing people to this blog. Plus, this blog is an expression and love letter to the internet as it once was. By 2013, before I even typed my first character into this blog, the internet had already become aggregated by social media, as lay people could now participate in content creation.
When I first started this blog, I was living in a different city for a failing company and realized that I didn't have a social media presence. I started this blog with the ambition of writing about web dev, to create a footprint that potential employers could find. It sort of worked; I ended up being laid off, selling my house, and packing for a much better job as I worked for a cool hipster agency in PDX. (RIP Emerge). This blog took an unexpected turn, first documenting my experiences (for the first time) in an empty city during the pandemic and later launching a YouTube presence.
Originally, I launched this blog on Tumblr, of all places, misunderstanding it as a platform for actual blogging. I quickly learned that Tumblr was Imgur with a feed for sad teenagers, not grown-ass adults, blogging about development. I went to great lengths to create my own minimalist theme (removing many Tumblr interactions) and was one of only a handful of people with a custom domain for their Tumblr blog. It's been a throwback since its inception, and the final straw was in 2016 when I abandoned Tumblr. While there is more friction in self-hosting, I've been happier with the results. Even if YouTube implodes tomorrow, the tutorials I've created will live on.