Eleven years. Eleven years ago I needed a little side project to play with that new web framework everyone was talking about. You could build a blog in as little as 5 minutes! I thought it would be fun to try to smash something together in time for the dConstruct 2011 conference and a blog was born. It probably took me the better part of the weekend to get my first Rails app up and running, right in time for the conference. That was 11 years ago.

It even landed me my first paid Rails job. They asked for some Rails sample code on the interview and this blog was the only I had to show for.

Blog

It’s a trip down memory lane browsing through my past ramblings on this blog. It’s kind of a diary in its own way and shows what I have been busy with over the last 11 years: most of it is Ruby on Rails, there was a busy BarCamp period, a long silence (that’s me being a dad now), a Bitcoin period and more recently it’s all Lego stuff.

The Lego page was added to keep track of my kid’s collection so the family knows what to buy. It was a prime candidate to learn CSS grid techniques and that is what this blog always has been about: a place to try and play with web stuff.

The blog has seen different iterations, with long periods of silence but it's still around! A nice achievement if you know the average lifetime of a webpage is around 100 days (data from 2003).

Iterations

In September 2013 I moved the Rails app to a simpler static Jekyll website so I no longer had to maintain a full Rails application. The migration to Jekyll went smoothly but I never really took time to come up with a new design. For years it simply had some half-finished CSS mix that was kind off responsive. Fast forward to Tiago’s CSS grid presentation: time to learn something new and finally finish the designing part of this website. I redid the design over the summer holidays and here it is a fully responsive version built using proper CSS grids.

Future

The website will never be finished, of course, it will be neglected again, start to annoy me, until I force myself to bring it back to life once more. There are a few rough edges to finish before taking on a new project:

• Remove the last few external HTTP requests from the photos, Lego and wishlist pages. The photos are loaded from Flickr, the Lego set images from Rebrickable. These are the only “leaks” left on the site, nothing else talks to the outside world. It’s not that it is tracking visitors but loading assets from another domain do leak the visitor's IP address and, well, it’s not so friendly to freewheel on their bandwidth either. I would like to improve the Rebrickable plugin to import the images locally and no longer fetch them each time the page is loaded.
• Reduce the link rot. Many, many, links in my older blog posts are dead now. The pages they point to no longer exist, or worse, have been domain squatted by some shady marketing sites. These need to be cleaned up.