About This Site
I have now switched domains but the domain this site used to use was a nickname on the internet for me for a while before I bought it. I had used that address for 25+ years.
Contrary to what plenty of people have thought at the time, it had nothing to do with the band Megadeth, although I do like quite a bit of their stuff.
When I registered this domain, I wanted it to be in the domain somehow, but the .com was taken, so I wound up with the .org. I wish I’d been more creative, but oh well. It is what it is. Finally, in 2025, after 25+ years of having the old domain, I moved it to something else.
I use it for email and just as a place to post my thoughts and ideas. Sadly, the email is mostly spam, but I keep it because there are some old accounts that use it, and I like to keep it available in case anyone wants to get in touch with me from the past.
Even though it’s been changed multiple times over the past twenty or so years, to my knowledge I have not deleted anything that was public. I’ve tweaked some things, but even as stupid as some of my old posts were, they’re still here someplace. There could have been files lost over time in one of my many moves, but none that I am aware of have been lost.
It’s been through several transitions over time. I started out doing all the HTML by hand. That wasn’t difficult to do or anything, but it was monotonous. It was fun and quite rewarding, though. Eventually, I added CSS into the mix. I had the idea that I wanted a blog setup, but I didn’t have the skills or patience to create one back then. I did eventually use shtml (who remembers that fun?) includes for menus and such, then basic PHP.
Eventually, I would end up using WordPress, which was much more convenient than hand coding the HTML. That was maybe 2006. I don’t remember how I discovered it, but it was after I moved to shared hosting, so I could do my brothers’ business website, which I did by hand in HTML too. They found someone else to do it that understood how to and was willing to make it all fancy.
After that, I tried B2evolution in late 2018 I think, which was very nice but more than I needed, which meant more potential security risks with no benefits of having those options. I mean, I didn’t need or want forums or a gallery and all that extra stuff. I wanted clean, fast, and secure. It was definitely fun to play with it for a few months, though.
I then came across static site generators, which to me is the best of both worlds. Pretty convenient. Markdown makes a lot more sense than typing HTML like I originally did. It’s just more intuitive and generates nice, clean HTML. I used Hugo for a couple of years, then came across Zola again. I switched over to that because the template language just makes so much more sense to my brain. Hugo was great, but when I wanted to tweak a template, my brain just struggled to grasp the syntax.
It’s pretty simple to make a new post or page now.
I created the markdown file.
Then I run:
zola --root ~/zola_sites/MySite/ serve
Once I’m happy with it, it’s as simple as
zola --root ~/zola_sites/MySite/ build && rsync -avhuc --stats --delete ~/zola_sites/MySite/public/ username@Mysite.com:~/public_html
To sync it. Shit it’s even in my command history now I don’t even have to type it. It only takes a second or two to rebuild and rsync everything after editing it.
As of now, this site uses no cookies, scripts, or any tracking, and I see no reason that that will change in the future. There are not any user accounts, so no need to register for anything. Comments on WordPress were kind of nice for the maybe two times I got relevant ones, but well over 99 percent of them were nothing more than SEO spam.
I like simple, clean, and fast. There aren’t countless third-party requests like you see too often. Fonts from here. Icons from there. Style sheets from someplace else. Scripts from all over. It’s just simple HTML and two .css files, both of which are hosted on my server.
There are no ads here either except for possibly an affiliate link, which I will explicitly specify as such, and that will only be for something that I use. Not that I get enough traffic to support monetization; it’s just not something that interests me. It’s only my personal space for my thoughts and ideas. It’s purely something I like doing. I guess it’s a hobby.
It took some time, but I have ported all of my templates and short codes over from Hugo to Zola. I’d originally begun with the hugo-dusk theme. Over time, I’ve made many modifications to fit my liking. I can’t say it’s based on that theme any longer since it’s been tweaked so much, but that was my original stepping stone. The Zola templates were from scratch.
It’s kind of nice not having to worry about the security exploits in a script. I see tons of 404 errors for scripts that I don’t have installed. Hell, I no longer even have PHP installed, so even if the scripts were there. I was also able to remove and not rely on MySQL or any other database, so that is one less thing to be running and keep up to date. If I chose to, I could move this to any place I want now.
Using Hugo, it gets built from Markdown to valid HTML just once, unless I update something. Stuff like WordPress has to rebuild it for every view, unless there’s some caching involved. I see that as a win.
Whenever I do edit the templates, I try to remember to run it through the W3C Markup Validation Service. I like to try to make sure it’s all valid HTML. I do the same in the CSS validator when I modify my style sheets. It’s the best way to assume it will work anywhere.
I did look into Jekyll at first, but I do not have Ruby installed for anything else, so I thought, Why have another dependency that I don’t need? Hugo requires Go to build, but not to run. I am not sure why, but Hugo just made sense to me.
It’s more or less for my thoughts, my ideas, and my experimenting with different things. If anyone finds anything useful, that’s great! If anyone finds anything interesting, that’s great too, but I know it’s mostly just boring that shit no one really cares about.
I’ve been through many hosts Over the years. Currently, I’m using NameCrane. Great service.