First Blog Post
Finally, I decided to rebuild this blog after all. And I actually did it…
About the blog/website:
Mainly, this place will feature materials on science, technology, engineering, cryptography, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence. But it doesn’t end there. Occasionally, I’ll write about gaming, books, TV series, life, and sometimes even a little history and philosophy. In short, about anything I find interesting and worthy of keeping in memory.
This blog is intended primarily for myself. By writing down and structuring my thoughts, I can revisit them years later, track my progress, remind myself of key lessons, and simply keep everything in one location. Essentially, it is my personal archive.
The history of this blog begins around 1996. It was never completely public: most materials, along with numerous subsequent iterations, remain private. Only certain notes do I publish publicly, naively assuming they might be useful to someone.
I have been working with technology for a very long time, so it’s quite possible that some of my observations, ideas, or practical experience will help others or at least spark interesting thoughts.
By my count, this is already the twelfth reincarnation of the blog. Over these years, it managed to live on different domains, change dozens of designs, themes, purposes, and engines. Perhaps the only thing that remained constant was my desire to constantly rebuild something.
This reincarnation, I hope, will be the last. I don’t plan on changing the blog address anymore, and the general topic will likely stay the same.
Though, who am I kidding. I’ll probably change the design a few more times, migrate everything to a custom engine, rewrite half the functionality, and tweak a bunch of minor details.
Timeline of the blog’s technical evolution:
12.01.2002 — Built my first website. Plain static HTML, free domain, and free hosting. It wasn’t even a blog, just a personal site. Back then I didn’t even know blogs existed. Though, come to think of it, they were already active and growing. The exact date is likely inaccurate, but I remember the year well.
19.11.2005 — Made everything look “very cool” (by my standards back then). Still stuck with pure HTML.
10.05.2006 — Moved the site to Blogger. Or maybe it was still called Blogspot or owned by Pyra Labs — I don’t recall.
22.09.2007 — Still HTML, but with a touch of CSS and JavaScript. At this exact point, the site officially became a blog. I don’t remember where I first saw this format, but blogs were quite common by then.
22.09.2008 — Switched to PHP include. Back then it felt incredibly progressive.
22.09.2009 — Added MySQL and essentially wrote something like my own CMS.
12.03.2010 — Moved to WordPress. Began the endless hunt for the “perfect off-the-shelf engine.” At the same time, I set up crossposting to almost every social network and service imaginable.
21.09.2010 — Switched to Drupal. Big mistake.
16.06.2011 — Tried Movable Type. Also a mistake.
29.08.2014 — Switched to GitHub Pages and a static site generator. Loved the core concept, but I really dislike relying on third-party code, especially when minor edits turn into full projects.
01.01.2015 — Returned to a custom engine.
17.05.2015 — Moved back to Blogger. Meanwhile, my custom engine stayed alive in the background as a backup and management tool.
UPD: 2015–2025 — Custom static generator + static HTML.
Over all this time, I seem to have tested nearly every popular approach to website building: pure HTML, PHP, CMS, custom engines, static generators, cloud platforms.
And I arrived at a simple conclusion: there is no perfect engine. Sooner or later, every tool starts annoying you with its limitations.
That is probably why this blog has already survived twelve reincarnations.
