This blog just passed its 20th birthday! 🎂

It feels so... distant. While this was not my first website (that honour goes to La Web de Programación 2001-2014), in 2004 I decided that I wanted to have one of those trendy personal development blogs. For a while, the blog lived in a blogging community, after a few months? A year? I decided to build and maintain a community on my own, and kartones.net was born, hosting, among others, this blog.

At first, I wrote in Spanish, but shortly after, I thought that why not switch to English to practice the language? I did my best to migrate posts when switching to my hosted solution, but it was very manual and tedious, so I excluded all the content in Spanish. That was a good lesson, since then, I've only used blog engines in which I have full control over the data (even if I have to transform it).

The first post that I keep in the blog is about game development. Back then, I already had a clear idea that directly working in the game development industry wasn't going to be my goal, but that I could have it instead as a secondary hobby. As an example, I convinced a teacher at my university to build a Windows and Pocket PC small RPG as my degree's final thesis/project (too bad I didn't finish the degree, and thus the game).

Back in those days I was in love with Microsoft technologies: I went from self-taught Visual Basic (versions 3 to 6) to achieving multiple C# official certifications; from being a Windows power user to reading the Windows Internals book; from reading about new Microsoft SDKs and APIs to rushing to tinker with them (e.g. I built MSN Messenger agents with SDKs that most developers never knew about). It's a bummer to see as of 2024 Windows spiralling into oblivion and .NET relegated to enterprise software. I still think that C# is one of the best development languages ever built, too bad it only ran under Windows for so long.

Anyway, as I was saying, during the first years the content was mostly about Microsoft-related technologies. Then, in 2009 I did a radical turn towards a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, thankfully the last one object-oriented PHP 5!), leaving .NET development only for hobby projects, at the end narrowed to only maintaining and extending the blogging engine. Windows was still my main operating system at home (and until 2013 at work), but I lost interest in keeping up with its inner workings other than to squeeze as much performance as possible from it.

In late 2014, the blog engine that I was using (Community Server 2007) began to fall apart with the newest .NET and IIS versions. Most blogs at the kartones.net community were already abandoned anyway, so I migrated away to a more minimalistic blog engine with single instances. Still contained server-side logic, but it ditched the database (BlogEngine.net was XML-based), so it was much more lightweight. In 2016 I would do another migration, this time to a Python static site generator, Pelican, whereas in 2024 the blog still stands, and I hope that for many more years. In this world of over-complications and mega-structures and frameworks, going for the simplest technical solution that suits your needs has served me well as a strategy.

Switching from underlaying engine migrations back to the topic of the blog contents, I think there have been three main trends or paths, so I'll cover each one in its subsection.

Development

While the specifics vary a lot with what I'm working on or tinkering with in my spare time, this was the main topic of the blog, and I hope it stays that way, always present in some form. From C# to Python and Javascript, from Ruby to Java, from SQL to Redis, from NAnt to Bazel, it is an insanely mixed bag of development contents. I'm currently checking every single post and improving the tags, so hopefully related content will be easier to find.

Doing brain dumps of ideas, problems I face, short explanations of topics, or small write-ups of small tinkering projects still feels relaxing. I like to think that, somehow, from my little corner of the Earth, I'm contributing a tiny bit of non-shitty information to the internet. I do write less than before, and, unlike other people, I keep writing as long or short as I feel it's OK (e.g. I never count the number of words, nor do I care if for SEO my posts should be longer or not), but I try to maintain a cadence of at least one post per month.

Game Development

Ah, one of my favourite topics, but one that I never spend enough time on. I start and leave many experiments, so for the last years I instead switched to doing tiny games, or micro-experiments or multiphase ones with "deliveries" at certain checkpoints; at least this way I'm able to always have something "done". I keep reading about the topic, but nowadays more and more related to either retro-gaming (old systems) or very narrow areas that I can easily experiment with (e.g. the Run-Length Encoding posts).

The cool thing is that since around 2020 I've been able to build some tools and mini-games from ideation to a full first implementation/version, which is way more than I did in the past. But I have a huge ideas backlog! Anyway, this topic won't go away

Miscellaneous Topics

Combining work-related secondary topics (e.g. security) with hobbies that faded away (e.g. robotics), the "other stuff" that I write about varies a lot. And some, I diverged it to other places. But one hobby that I keep, and thankfully I'm ramping up, is reading and writing reviews of every book I read.

Traffic, maintenance/support, and closing thoughts

Not really worth a section, but to differentiate from the previous ones 😁.

Traffic/visits is something that I stopped caring about long time ago. I've never followed closely all SEO practices, just picking and applying those that, look like common sense and good for the site or for the human visitors (not for crawlers and the like). I've seen how certain google Page Rank and SEO changes caused considerable drops in visits to my blog. Likewise, I never implemented AMP pages (the site is responsible and blazing fast on mobile), but I implement micro-formats as they help to better represent information. I also acknowledge that certain content becomes obsolete, no longer relevant, so it is just natural that gets fewer search result hits, and visits decrease.

Many of the posts I write about relate to quite niche topics. I get orders of magnitude more visits from posts I've written about videogame hacking, or "how to install Windows 10 on the ASUS ROG Ally", than on any of my development or game development posts (even things I find really useful like my git cheat sheet).

I still manage to get a few daily visits, and some small spikes when something I write gets a bit of traction. It is a distant shadow of the past, though, where on a bad day it would still get a few thousand hits. We all use search engines less and less, few people use RSS any more, and when I deleted my Twitter account I lost 1.3k followers that I was spamming with each new blog post. So I think I am the main cause of the low traffic, by just relying on organic traffic without shady SEO practices. And proof that where you write content matters is my Postgres command line cheat sheet gist: I've always thought it is a pretty basic and incomplete guide, but it has 3.5k GitHub stars and 1.1 forks 🤷. But to be honest, I don't really care, I would keep posting here, in "my realm", even if I had no visitors (my role-playing blog has 0 to 5 daily visits!).

Last 30 days of blog traffic (captured 2024-12-10 early in the morning)

Regarding the blog's maintenance, I've been running it in a static site form almost for a decade now, which means it could even live anywhere; I have a small cloud instance, in which I run other stuff and experiments too. In the past, it had some ads (AdSense, and then something that I consumed as an XML and controlled the rendering by myself), but I've never liked them too much, so as soon as the income became negligible, I simply removed them. And I won't bring them back, so for now, I pay for the instance and the domain name. But I confess I'm guilty of recently adding a support me page (and, after waiting for months, got the GitHub Sponsors thingy enabled for my account). Not that I expect to get anything for real, but by not having ads, this is how I clearly signal the only way I accept monetary contributions. And hey, if somebody really feels generous, they can contribute. All my content and code at GitHub is freely available anyway, so who cares...

Anyway, I'm not used to writing such long posts, but a 20th anniversary is something special, so here it goes.

Happy coding, and Merry Christmas!