Antoine Kalmbach

This site /

Origin of this site

About five years ago I realized I wanted to have a website again. Yes, again, this wasn’t the first time I had had a website.

I think I had my first website in the late 90s, it was hosted on xoom.com and I had to upload content to it via FTP over a 56k modem, no broadband at that time yet. We had fast internet at our school so sometimes I edited the site there. Later on I switched to hosting provided by a Finnish computer magazine MikroBitti. I stopped maintaining that site around 2005 or so, I must have been 17 or something and had more important things to worry about (like school and World of Warcraft… ok, mostly World of Warcraft).. It wasn’t interesting anymore, it mostly contained some CSS website layouts I had made.

Early 2015 I decided I wanted to write a blog. I had no idea what about, but everyone on the internet seemed to have some sort of verbal outlet for their computer things. So I joined the club, copied some Jekyll theme from somewhere, and wrote a couple of posts. Eventually I ended up deleting those, and I had actually nothing on this site, but in January 2016 I lowered the bar and started again.

It seems the most active year (up to now) was 2016, with the quietest period being the years 2018-2019. I had lots of things going on in my life around that time, and I was still holding the site to too high a standard. I was torn: because I was misusing blogging as a medium, I couldn’t blog as a journal instead I was blogging as a magazine. I’ve come to accept that if I am to blog often it needs to be an informal journal, otherwise I will set the posting standard too high and not post.

Fast forward to 2020 I ended up revitalizing my interest on this site, and this happened almost by accident. I created a created a microblog and then ended it, because I realized it made no sense to have a blog with an arbitrary minimum post length. Then I realized I need to actually have more than just blog posts, many of the blog posts I have are actually quite gargantuan in size.

So I started to transition the site towards the blog being, well, just an online journal of sorts. More structured content is grouped and assembled into the front page, you can read about that over here. Eventually, most of the content will live outside the blog in various sections, because I think blogging as a medium should focus more on a streams-of-though type of posting instead of having informative content. I think combining the two makes it very confusing for readers.