Welcome
This site has been created as a way for me to keep track of my projects, tidbits, fixes, and other bits of information I have found useful over time. The navigation on the left walks the tree from the root downwards, and the location bar at the top can be used for moving up the tree again. The site is powered by Blosxom, a rather elegant Perl based blog software that is very configurable. It runs on a FreeBSD box, and it designed to be as simple as possible and standards compliant. As a result, this site does not use cookies or Javascript, making it work on pretty much any type of device that follows web-standards.
Any news/updates will be posted on this page below.
Updates
September 2024
After the success of the FreeBSD workstation I decided to migrate my laptop from Linux to FreeBSD as well. That took some tweaking, so did a write up on the site named "FreeBSD on Thinkpad X201" to help anyone else who might want to do it too.
Apart from that I worked on audio projects, primarily for the Denon CD Deck and the Audio DAC. Also cleaning up typos and other mistakes I find on old articles when I spot them.
May 2024
Mostly cleaning up previous articles and this home page. Little things like spelling mistakes, typos and refactoring sentences. Also added more symbols to the Blosxom symbol-mapping logic.
Also a milestone for myself, I have my first FreeBSD workstation. Up until now I've only used FreeBSD on servers, however my desktop was having some problems with Linux that needed a reinstall, so I decided to give FreeBSD a spin. So far the experience has been positive. Of the things that work, they work better than Linux, the OS feels more unified and polished. It actually feels like I'm using OSX, except without the Apple GUI (I use windowmaker instead, which fits my needs perfectly).
The downside is that some things don't work on FreeBSD that work on Linux, such as sleep mode. I can't get my machine to resume from suspend, so my choices are to either shut it down, or leave it running overnight. As this is not a laptop it isn't the end of the world. Apparently suspend/hibernate is a bit hit and miss, sometimes it works, sometimes not. It depends on the hardware (so like Linux in the 2000's really).
March 2024
Minor changes to the way the site works. I've made the navigation bar ordered alphabetically so you will notice a change of order from before, however it should now remain consistent. Also some back-end changes to handle common symbols by replacing them with their HTML equivalents.
Apart from that general work on restoring old articles, writing new ones and updating where necessary (mostly fixing typos).
January 2024: Site back on-line
Happy new year! After a hiatus of over 10 years, I have brought this site back online, completely re-written. It didn't feel like 10 years have passed, but life really gets busy the older you get. Only when the Covid lockdowns occurred did I actually have enough time free time after work for personal projects, during which I decided it would be nice to bring the site back.
The old CMS is gone. Back in the early 2000s the concept of a CMS was new and money could be made offering it to others as a web service. As part of a web design company I wrote a CMS which would be offered to clients and this website was my main testing ground for new CMS developments and debugging before it went into production.
Since then however, website builders and open source blogging software like wordpress replaced custom CMSes so there is not much point in using a proprietary CMS, especially as I was the only one left still using it. In addition it was far more powerful and complex than I needed it to be. For example, having a full blown WYSIWYG editor with image upload and insertion was fine for customers, but I preferred writing in HTML so it was overcomplicated for my needs.
Therefore in its place is Blosxom as mentioned above, its flexibility allowing me to quite radically alter the way it works using plugins, while building on an existing stable base. The old dark theme has also been replaced. As was the case with my previous site design, this theme is written to work on all standards-compliant browsers. This time I went for even more minimalism, to maximise the amount of space available for the articles themselves.
Ironically when everyone was into light themes I had a dark one, and now as everyone goes to "dark mode" themes I went to a light one. I seem to always go against the grain. I may well port the old theme to the new website at some point, but I would have to make a way to allow visitors to pick the theme they want and keep it for the session without using cookies (because I hate those EU-mandated "cookie" warnings every site has to have now, and this site uses no cookies currently so I don't have to bother with that).
As for the original articles, a lot of them 10+ years old and in a different format to the current system. As such it will take time to review and port them across. Most likely only those articles that were complete will be ported over.
Beyond that, I will be writing new articles based on projects and useful bits of information that I make use of today. As I have changed the backend, the old URLs that are posted in links across the web no longer work. In such a case best option is to look on the navigation bar on the left to see if the article is available. If there is an article you really would like to see again let me know by e-mailing "zv" at this domain and I can see if I can put it up.
