Restarting the blog

TL;DR: New blog, who dis? Please help me decide what to write about by voting in this Twitter poll. Thanks.

Test, test.. 1, 2. Is this thing on? Wonderful! Welcome back, everybody. Somewhere back in 2019 I had a month where I blogged a lot. I wrote most of the articles you see on here and many of them are actually quite popular! There's more than a thousand people stopping by here every month to learn about shell scripting from me.

I find that very silly, but hey. Glad that I can help some of you with your questions. And I'd like to do that again.

In the past two years I've learned a lot about programming. There's so many things I still haven't shared about payments and e-commerce that I learned while working for Wirecard.

In 2021 I have taken a conscious decision to step away from taking on more freelance work than I currently have. Instead I want to focus more on my own projects again. To build things that are interesting, helpful, or just funny to me. And part of that is engaging with people through this blog.

What's new?

Since its humble beginnings, this blog has gone through three major revisions. The third one being the current one. Here's a short overview:

Two-file PHP setup that rendered Markdown on demand
Custom PHP setup that rendered Markdown and Mustache
Custom PHP static site generator from Markdown and Mustache

I didn't intend to build a static site generator, but the pieces were all just lying there and so I rewired them. Along with making this site super fast, I also added these things:

Dedicated post series for multi-part things
A weekly newsletter you can subscribe to
After many requests: an RSS feed for you to consume
Easier sharing to various places
An actual navigation

And then I reworked how posts look and feel a little bit, which gives me the ability to write more structured and informative content.

For example I can now use this box to give more detailed context-specific information about various topics. Or snarky side comments.

Neat.

What's next?

With this announcement, the blog is officially considered "re-launched" by me and while I have a few topics in mind, I'd love to hear what you want to see me write about! Because it's more fun to write about stuff that is actually interesting to people.

If you want to help decide, please vote in this Twitter poll and I'll get on it for next week's post! Until then, stay safe, stay healthy and have a good time!