I updated my blog style and infrastructure

My blog across the years

I have been blogging for eight years now. I have written about many things that interest me, and things about me that I have discovered. This blog is not so much a niche place for a specific subject, although lately I have been writing a lot about Bitcoin. (I am not called Bitcoin Ville for nothing!) This place is not my curriculum vitae, but a collection of opinions. This blog is my treasure trove of experiences written in words. It has become a personal and public journal. This place is a part of me now.

I started back in 2018, when I was about to begin to study for psychology for three years. I was motivated to write about my housing experience, and share my story in a Facebook group. I was also hoping that I’d find a room by doing that, alas that didn’t work. I got the house through official channels by accident.

Interestingly, someone started to “download” my blog to the Internet Archive in 2020, two years after I started writing. I thought it was both creepy and amazing. Someone cared enough to save my opinions to a later day? My words can and will be used against me, I thought. But as I understand it, it may not be a person with an agenda saving my blog, but rather a bot that “crawls” the internet.

Lucky for me though: Now I can show you how my blog looked back then! Unfortunately I have no images of how it looked like in 2018 or 2019. I do remember it looked like a skeleton.

Fig 1. Blog in 2020.

My favourite colour was orange, and I was using Sans Serif font. I didn’t have many blog posts so I figured to share the description of the post and leave a “read more” button, too.

I had a ‘photography’ and ‘contact’ section as well. However, I didn’t upload photos in the end, and deleted that section.

Later I combined ‘contact’ with ‘me’ to make it simpler.

Fig 2. Blog in 2021.

Later I started to lean more into minimalism. So much so that I lost all colour from my blog, and went back to black and white aesthetics. I also didn’t like to put images to blog posts, but only text. In other words, literal “black on white”. I really appreciated the simplicity.

I also took away the initial descriptions of each post, and merely shared the title and the date. To this day, I like it this way. I also liked the Serif font. I capitalised all the nouns in the post headings. Now I am leaning back to only capitalising the first letter of the heading.

Fig 3. Blog in 2024 and 2025.

Then the aesthetics looked liked this. I really liked it, and it looked more professional. I paid 66 euros for this per year, compared to 40 euros in previous years. It wasn’t so much money because I had just started to work a “big boy job”. However, it was quite a lot of money for something that didn’t produce revenue. I don’t earn anything from my writing and I don’t subscribe to the attention economy and advertising hell.

Be that as it may, I thought anyway that not all things need to be looked from the perspective of “does it make money?” This is first and foremost my hobby and hobbies cost. However, I have to say that the price of 66 euros per year is still quite salty for a blog. That’s why I looked toward alternative solutions.

Fig 4. Blog in 2026.

What’s cool about this is that now I pay zero, nada, nil, nothing! I should’ve done this long ago, but back then I wasn’t sure if I’m going to keep writing or not. At that time, I just wanted things to be easy and out of the way. I had more urgent things to attend to. Moreover, I didn’t know how to code. But with the advent of LLMs and “vibecoding”, it was fairly easy to do this. It was quite enjoyable yesterday to get it finally working.

Hugo SSG and Github Pages

If you are not interested in the technicals, you can skip this section.

I used Hugo Static Site Generator (SSG). There are many other SSGs like Jekyll, Zola, and so on. Hugo had fairly great amount of interesting looking themes that some developers were open to share. I found this, named Shibui theme, and I fell in love. I know it doesn’t look the greatest, and perhaps you dislike the serif monospace font, but I love the Japanese minimalism behind it. I used to be crazy about Japanese minimalism back in the day.

I use Github Pages as the site host. It is free. Given that the whole site is a mere 50 MB big, the traffic is not going to be problem. I mean, no-ones reading my blog anyway so… hahahahah. Hah. Doesn’t matter.

The source code and files of my blog is now out there in the open, in my github.

To write a blog post, I need to write it first locally in Obsidian in markdown, then add a so-called “front matter” to the writing, and finally copy-paste the file to the specific local folder. Afterward I go to terminal and put a few commands there, namely:

git add .

git commit -m "name of the blog post or any other description or comment"

git push

And that is it. The post is now live. The workflow is a little different, but it is easy when you know a few things about computer terminals and basics.

Write.as to Wordpress

I paid 40 euros a year to host my blog at a place called Write.as from 2018 until 2023. It was really good and simple enough. The place was also friendly for anonymous writers, so I subscribed to their values. Write.as was great for the time being, and it helped me to kickstart writing.

Later it dawned on me that I wanted to have a comment section. Unfortunately, they never implemented it. I looked toward Wordpress. When I got work at a crypto custody firm in 2023, I upgraded my blog using Wordpress.com.

I thought that a comment section would drive some discussion, and people would share their opinions with me, but o’boy, o’boy I was mistaken. Practically no-one commented, and those who did anyway, sent me a private message. It seems that the place to talk about blog posts is on social media, and not on the blog itself.

So now, with the new blog update, there is no more comment section. Actually, there is no more automated emails either for people to receive when I have posted a new blog post. So actually, it is up to me to signal to people through various channels that I have a new blog post. That is now up to me how I do it. I might set up a Listmonk and self-host it, so people get a notification. But this needs some more tinkering and thinking to do.

What do I write next?

So now, I pay nothing to have my blog out there. I lose comment section, but no-one used it anyway. I am now also 100% in control of my blog. Furthermore, the blog is more minimalistic and aesthetic, and the code is also a lot more leaner and lighter, and the website is more responsive. This is nerdy amazing.

I have been thinking about what to write next. I feel like there are so many things I could write about, however, not enough time and space to do that. However, here’s some things I know for now.

One, I am not going to write so much about Bitcoin anymore. I find that I have exhausted all avenues of writing anything about it. It seems that not too many people find them interesting anymore, even from the Bitcoin space. Either bitcoin price is not matching people’s expectations, or the content is “too much” as I’ve heard.

Two, it takes a lot of time to write about Bitcoin - and in general actually - and I feel that the time is better focussed elsewhere. I do not have a job still, and I am in desperate need to find one, and very soon. This is why I am also in a dire need to focus my time elsewhere. Writing takes time, and it doesn’t pay me. Now I need to train other skills that may make more hireable. My writing skill is maxxed out at 99 out of 99. (I could write a book, but that’s for a later date.)

Three, however, I am still keen to write about personal experiences and stories. For example, I have been inspired to write about religion, God, relationships, feelings, vipassana, consciousness, and the heart.

If you want to keep reading my blog, I suggest you put it into your bookmarks and go there when I come to your mind, on some random, sunny day.

You can also add me to your RSS reader app and import the index.xml file in there. That way you can follow me more consistently.

And if you are my close friend, you can see if I put any new status updates in messaging applications. I might also share posts in various social media places, albeit I am not so intentionally active in these places.

Be well.