Most websites have become chimeric hogs with layer after layer of complexity and mindlessly-crammed unnecessary perks, which even more bloated browsers are then supposed to process to justify hardware sales. A nightmare. By contrast, this website is consciously crafted to be informative, relatively simple, understandable and maintainable by a single person, secure, respectful of the privacy of visitors and of my freedom to shape and control it at will, while also reasonably pretty.

This website runs on a $5/month virtual machine (so-called VPS), which also hosts my own email server. The VPS is running Parabola, a GNU+Linux distro derived from Arch and endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, which I helped develop and maintain between 2015 and 2018 (I have also been using GNU+Linux on my personal computers since 2009). On a marginal note, these experiences in turn helped me land jobs at domain registrar and cloud companies (Neubox, Rackspace). I have never rented with them though, for that I have always relied on gandi.net.

Beyond the fact that it's using a rolling-release distro infamous for its unfriendliness, and stallman-esque Parabola of all Arch-based distros, there's nothing special with the software: HTTP is served by nginx. You can't verify this, but client visits aren't logged. Postfix, dovecot and opendkim deal with the arguably more complex world of email.

Speaking of the website itself, I have steered away from dynamic blog solutions (e.g. Wordpress). Other than giving you a pretty GUI for drafting and managing the blog, there's no reason for me to have a Turing-complete programming language and a full-blown relational database dynamically re-creating the same pages again and again with every request. I would have been hacked many times already if I did this. I have seen this happen hundreds of times at work.

This is not to say HTML files are written by hand. I write blog posts in Markdown and then have a static website generator update a fixed set of HTML files. There are many of them nowadays, Urubu is the one I use. If it doesn't look like it that's because I customized the HTML and CSS theme to be simpler (no Twitter Bootstrap bloat!), inspired by motherfuckingwebsite.com and bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com.

In addition, I host a Parabola mirror and a Hyperbola mirror. The server in turn uses this mirror to update itself (and serve as a sporadic test of the mirror). How cool is that: imagine hitting the "update OS" button and finding out that it's your computer itself who is providing the updates to everyone.

It doesn't run ads. I doesn't run trackers. I don't need to put cookies in your jar. External references are kept at a minimum, when I need to load heavy media files which wouldn't fit in my server. I especially avoid informing Google, Facebook and the likes of you being here, which is to say there are no "like" buttons or random webfonts here. I haven't even had a need to add javascript to it, let alone someone else's obfuscated javascript. You can check all of these claims with browser extensions like uBlock, etc. (you should be using it anyway, for your own delight). Recommended browser is Firefox, not because the website isn't standards compliant, but because other popular browsers think very lowly of standards and of users. I am not trying to profit from you being here. Enjoy.