After 6 years of blogging in my native language, it is time for me to switch to a new English-only publication medium, ie. this very new blog.
Context
The idea behind this decision is to be able to reach out to a more technical audience, as more and more of my publications are becoming just too specialized to be published on the blog I created when I was 20.
One cannot expect the latter to be followed by people interested in the technical English articles while they are mixed up with French articles. It would be a sure mess in their RSS readers. Heck, even I already search anything technical in English, who does search technical information in French except from students?
The main downside I can see about this decision is that writing will require more effort, as English is not my native language — and probably is not yours either, statistically speaking. But the effort is worth it in my opinion: as keeping a blog has really helped me to be more comfortable with writing {articles,emails,whatever} in French, I think that the same benefits can be obtained from periodically writing in English on this Internet spot.
Technology
This blog is a static website, as I consider it to be the only sane publication option at the moment for me. No maintenance burden, publish using rsync, this kind of technical stack that is robust enough to have already served me well for 6 years and probably many more.
Chosen generator is Pelican, because it has suited my needs during all this time and actually no contestant is currently able to provide the same feature set (looking at you, Hugo and Zola). This will probably be the topic of an upcoming article after this ought to be short one.
Design
The design and layout is very inspired (if not mostly copy-pasted) from Drew DeVault's blog. I find it really clear to read so I took it as a base instead of going from scratch. Well, I did however write the CSS file from scratch, using the web inspector to find out the minimal set of rules that it would require to display a proper layout.
I have added dark theme support, that will automatically switch on so that it will not blow your eyes if everything else is dark. Your browser need to advertise the dark preference, tough, elsewise the default white theme will be used.
The illustration is a photo of my current coffee cup that I pixel-art'ed in an hour or so. You can see that I am not really an artist when it comes to this kind of creative work. As bad as it looks, I will keep it while my mind does not come with anything better than that.
Feedback
This website is Web 1.0 only: there is no dynamic interaction possible.
This is intentional, as setting up any comment system would be too time consuming to be worth it for me. For me, reading emails is simpler than having to access whatever web interface to check for comments. It should also be simpler for you: just fire your mail client and sent the comment as an email!
Enjoy
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