Hello World, yet again

Yes, this isn’t the first post on this blog, but it’s surprisingly appropriate to call this “Hello World”.

m4txblog^4

This is the fourth incarnation of my personal blog. The 2010 year in the footer is no coincidence, because that’s when it all started. Back then, my blog (available back then at m4tx.pl) was only available in Polish and only two posts were written in English during its four years of existence.

Fast-forward 11 years after the last blogpost—I feel obliged to say hi again. A lot has changed during that time, but at some point I felt I actually missed writing texts from time to time. During the time, my old blog kept rotting, plagued by spam comments (most of which, but not all, were nicely filtered out by Akismet, thankfully) and breakages that kept appearing after updating the blog engine. I knew I had to do something—either remove it completely, or spend a nontrivial amount of time to preserve it otherwise.

So, yeah. Here we go again.

Changes

The most obvious one is the language. While I’m sure it wouldn’t be without benefits to keep the blog in Polish, writing it in English will allow me to reach much bigger audience, and hopefully I’ll learn English a bit in a process, too.

I’ve decided that I want to keep my content close to the development stuff. In the past, I’ve written about various topics, but I feel like I want to keep it more focused this time. Looking in the past, I’m not particularly proud of some posts that I’ve written about topics I had no idea about, so I want to avoid that.

Perhaps the least visible change is the blog engine used underneath. As you might know from my previous post, some time ago I started working on a “web framework for lazy developers” called Cot. I decided to write a blog engine using it, both to have a playground to test the framework in a production-ish environment, and just to prove that I can put something using the framework. I can finally ditch WordPress—don’t get me wrong though, it’s an excellent engine that fits surprisingly wide range of use cases. But it just make sense to power this blog with a piece of software I built exactly for this purpose.

Archive

Disclaimer: I’m still in the middle of the migration process, so the archive doesn’t quite work yet. Hopefully it will be ready soon.

I’ve decided to archive the old posts using the new engine. I’m really ashamed about at least some of them, but I wanted to keep the history unaltered. Each one will now display a message at the top saying that “this post is really old”, so that’s an additional benefit to the new visitors.

I’ve also decided that having a working comment section might be useful, so not only did I implement a commenting functionality, but also migrated all the comments from the old blog.

Final thoughts

This blogpost, while called “Hello World” really marks the 100th post I’ve written on my personal blog. This feels like an anniversary and achievement I haven’t been able to achieve for the past 15 years. What will happen next, we’ll see. Hopefully many more for the years to come.