Hello and welcome to my new website.
The above is what my old website, robot-one.blogspot.co.uk looked like (see also mirrors on Archive.org and Archive.today).
Took me long enough to get it up and running, having started webdev at my previous website, in Q2 2016 in free time in the Mechanical Engineering building at the University of Bath. The screenshot shows what it used to look like, in all its mid-2000s glory, running on Google’s Blogger platform. It’s now Q1 2022.
Chapter 1: The old Blogger site
I was quite proud of some small customisations I did to the theme code, but very quickly hit the limitations of Blogger: I was a newbie, and wanted to implement loads of custom Javascript, Facebook comments (this was before Big Tech was considered evil) and download a backup of my site. Turns out, exporting data from Blogger is kinda difficult, and re-using that export even harder. So I became otherwise occupied by Manufacturing Engineering studies and work at Explorium.
Fast-forward a couple years, and I’d redone two programming classes at Bath, and done a lot of obsessive software testing during which I came across Hugo, which made it relatively easy to setup a website on GitHub Pages. I was now ready to setup my own website, and I wrote private documentation covering the process. With this system, I could own all my source code and data and have a full data export/backup of the website.
And then I found I still didn’t own all the data. Turns out, web development is a mess because most people hotlink vital website resources (i.e. load them from someone else’s computer). I needed to fix that, at least for the code I would use on my site, by learning more advanced HTML/JS/CSS. So I became distracted again.
Why is data ownership important?
Google has a bad habit of killing off old projects, hence hosting any amount of work on Blogger, a legacy Google service which could be next on the chopping block, is a bad idea. I already mentioned the difficulty of exporting anything useful from the service, should it die, and good luck reusing your exported data anywhere else.
Most other services like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, etc. have similar problems: no source code access, so your work on your website can be held hostage by a for-profit company that will try and make you pay for every little feature.
As for hotlinking bits of website code, this was considered bad manners back in the Old Internet, because you’d consume someone else’s limited computing power to pull stuff into your website. I’ve read funny stories where sysadmins found people hotlinking to their servers, so they would swap out the resources with rude memes, which would then show up, vandalising the naughty hotlinker’s website. I don’t want anyone to to this to me, or breaking my site by pushing dodgy updates, and often work in limited internet environments, so I make sure to load all my resources locally. Bonus: Because of this precaution, I could, worst-case-scenario, easily host my website fully off my PC.
Downside: It takes a lot of work to read through the website theme code and fix it all. Hence the delay.
Kept you waiting, huh?
After years of delays, here we are. I’ve kept busy, and have a lot I want to share with you.
Coming soon
- A how-to guide on setting up your own website just like mine
- Several retrospective tech articles about projects I’ve done:
- How, and why, to white-hat hack a Windows PC
- How I removed a cryptominer
- Repairing a phone found in the road
- University project: The Mouse Race
- University project: misc. programming
- University project: Bath course materials
- Portfolios of my art, design and manufacture work
- eBooks I’ve built
- Audiobooks I’ve recorded
- Recipes
- Science-fiction/fantasy stories I’m writing
- Nerdy hobbies
- Philosophy and mythology
- Guest articles, if I can convince any of my friends to contribute 😉
I’m also working on improving the website theme with my own tweaks here, so expect the site to look and work better and better over the coming months. Or maybe I’ll just switch themes. Dunno yet.
Anyways, until next time,
Darren, signing off.
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