This is my last post

29 september, 2021

… here.

Everything comes to an end

It's been 5 years since my last post here. I think we can safely assume that I will never post anything on here again.

Shed a tear, fellow internet stranger

This was my very first blog, and I love it. I cannot imagine taking it down, because I have so many good memories associated with it.

The loud-ass fan running 24/7 under my desk, preventing a good night sleep, but necessary to reach 99.999999999% uptime between to electrical outages…

Spending Wasting time typing posts in HTML, tweaking the CSS, then markdown, tweaking the CSS, reinstalling the OS, building a makefile for it, tweaking the CSS, starring at it, tweaking the CSS, …

Forcing myself into learning a topic because I HAVE TO WRITE A FUCKING POST PER MONTH.

Planning updates, Recovering from hardware issue, Recovering from stupidity issue, Acting like I was doing backups correctly, …

Man these were funky times!

Monochromatic is dead, long live whatever!

But I grew up. I changed, and so did my interests. This blog's "engine" is fairly static after all, and after carrying it over the years, I need something different.

I'm more of a sysadmin than a programmer, and as such, I like building and automating things. As I get older, I tend to be lazier than enthusiastic about blogging, and the process I forced myself into with this blog doesn't cut it anymore, and isn't "portable":

• pull out the repo
• mkdir -p $(date "+%Y/%m")
• write the article in markdown
• run make to generate the tarball
• realise I forgot to list the file in config.mk
• make again
• commit post in git
• push it and hope for the git hook to work (it never does)
• deploy the website manually from a tarball
• read the post online, and pick a typo…

This feels so painful now.

I still like to write about stuff, but I need a simpler way to do it. I've tried a few times to change the way I blog there, but in the end, it would mean changing all the URLs, changing the way I generate the HTML, and totally recreate this blog from scratch, just keeping the old articles. And as I said, this blog is full of good memories, and being a nostalgic person here, I don't want to change it!

So what's next ?

One thing's for sure: I'm not stopping my activity on the internet.

This blog will remain up, but will not receive further updates after this post.

My main website (https://z3bra.org) will remain up, because I now use it to promote the tools I write, so I'll keep updating that at least.

I brought back my gopher hole: gopher://z3bra.org (http), and hacked together a gopher proxy to make it easier to read. It's far from perfect, and rather fragile, but does the job. At some point I'll put a relayd(8) in front of it and call it "finished".

I also started blogging over gopher, using scribo. The phlog is currently hosted at gopher://phlog.z3bra.org (http).

This workflow suits me for now, and I like the simplicity of gopher. I might look into gemini at some point…

Closing thoughs

Running this blog was a great experience. Now it's time for me to move on to something new and more refreshing. At this time, it means gopher, but this might (will!) change as time goes by.

If you've been following this blog, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I hope you've enjoyed reading me as much as I loved posting here!

Gros bisoux les copains, et à trés vite !