The Blog
This blog was started in September 2007 for me to voice anything that crosses my mind and that I feel warrants further thought. Often that is software, sometimes it is money, and more often than not it is something else.
The Software
Starting in late 2014, the site has been run on Github pages and generated using the Pelican static site generator. This system makes the blog extremely fast and allows it to be run using extremely little hardware. Even the search engine is pre-computed and rendered client-side.
For about five years prior to this, this site ran on a VPS provided by Rackspace (née slicehost.com). Ultimately, this became a headache whenever the site got a surge in traffic, as that would cause Rackspace to shut me down. On top of that, Rackspace cost money each month that a static site doesn’t. During this time, the site ran on the venerable Drupal CMS with an Ubuntu LAMP stack backing that up.
Prior to running it on Rackspace, I ran the site for about two years out of my attic.
You’re looking at the fifth version of this site.
The fourth version was run on Drupal, and looked something like this:
The third version was much the same with regards to content and technology, but with the Pleroma theme. It looked something like this:
Wandering further back in time, the second version was hand-coded in the Fedora and Ubuntu environments utilizing vim. It looked something like this:
You can still kinda browse that one even today.
The first version was made in 2004 in the Windows XP Professional environment utilizing Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver CS, Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. It was a dark time, but even that one still kind of works. It looked something like this:
Yes, it was made by a five year old.
Your Privacy
I don’t collect much information on this site, except through blog comments and messages sent to me through the contact page. I won’t do evil with the info collected on these pages, meaning that I won’t share it with others unless you ask me to, I won’t post it publicly, and I’ll delete it if you ask me to. Generally speaking, I’ll simply treat your data with the respect it deserves.
I should mention however that similar to the Google Analytics system, which is on 88% of web domains, at present I use Piwik on this site to learn about how the site is used. Among other things, this tool collects anonymous information about how you found my site, some information about your computer, what country you are from, and what network provider you use. In the case of some large organizations, this may mean that I may know that a visitor from your organization visited my site.
To see the kinds of information that is collected by Piwik, please feel free to play with their online demo. For now, I have not allowed access to my own stats for fear of a repeat of the AOL scandal.
My Copyright, Your License
All written material on this site is copyright Michael Lissner and is licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons copyright. Roughly, this means that you can copy the materials on this site if you attribute me, do not use the materials commercially, and if you place this same license on the result of your copy. You should check out the license yourself though if you have any concerns about the particulars.
Unless marked otherwise, any computer code found on this site is copyright Michael Lissner, and is licensed under the third version of the GNU Affero General Public License. Roughly, this means that you can take the code and do with it as you please, but only if you share the result under this same permissive license. Again, you should check out the license yourself if you have any concerns about the particulars.
If you feel that these licenses are prohibitive for your purposes, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly.
Questions, Thoughts, Comments
If you have any thoughts about the site, these policies, or for that matter, anything else, please feel free to contact me.
I love getting feedback and comments. Make my day by making a comment.