At long last, I finally decided to remake this blog once again. And I actually did it…
About the blog/site:
Mainly, content here will cover science, technology, engineering, cryptography, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence. But it doesn’t end there. Occasionally, I’ll write about games, books, TV series, life, and sometimes even a bit of history and philosophy. In short, about everything that seems interesting and worthy of preserving in memory.
This blog is primarily intended for myself. By recording and structuring my thoughts, I can return to them years later, see my own progress, remind myself of important things, and simply keep everything in one place. Essentially, this is my personal archive.
The history of this blog begins around 1996. It has never been fully public: most of the materials, as well as its numerous subsequent versions, remain closed. I publish only a few notes in open access, naively believing that they might prove useful to someone.
I have been working with technology for a very long time, so it is quite possible that some of my observations, ideas, or practical experience will help others or at least inspire interesting thoughts.
By my estimates, this is already the twelfth reincarnation of the blog. Over the years, it managed to live on different domains, change many designs, topics, goals, and engines. Perhaps the only thing that remained constant was my desire to constantly remake something.
This reincarnation, I hope, will be the last. I don’t plan to change the blog address anymore, and the overall theme will most likely remain the same.
Though, who am I kidding. I’ll probably change the design a few more times, migrate everything to my own custom engine, rewrite half of the functionality, and tweak a few more small details.
Chronology of the technical evolution of the blog:
12.01.2002 — Created my first website. Simple static files, free domain, and free hosting. It wasn’t even a blog, just a personal website. Back then, I didn’t even know blogs existed. Though, thinking about it, they were already around and growing actively. Also, the exact date is likely imprecise, but I remember the year well.
19.11.2005 — Made everything “very pretty” (by my standards back then). Still remained on pure HTML.
10.05.2006 — Moved the site to Blogger. Or maybe back then it was called Blogspot or owned by Pyra Labs — I don’t recall exactly.
22.09.2007 — Still HTML, but with a small amount of CSS and JavaScript. It was at this exact moment that the site finally turned into a blog. I don’t remember whose site inspired this format first, but by that time there were already plenty of blogs around.
22.09.2008 — Switched to PHP includes. Back then, it felt insanely progressive.
22.09.2009 — Added MySQL and essentially wrote something akin to my own custom CMS.
12.03.2010 — Moved to WordPress. Started the endless quest for the “perfect pre-built engine.” At the same time, I set up crossposting to virtually all social networks and services possible.
21.09.2010 — Moved to Drupal. Bad decision.
16.06.2011 — Tried Movable Type. Also a bad decision.
29.08.2014 — Moved to GitHub Pages and a static site generator. Loved the idea itself, but I handle dependency on other people’s code poorly, especially when even minor tweaks become a separate task.
01.01.2015 — Returned to my custom engine.
17.05.2015 — Moved back to Blogger again. Meanwhile, my custom engine remained in the background as a backup and management tool.
UPD: 2015–2025 — Custom static generator + plain HTML.
Over all this time, I seem to have tried almost every popular approach to running a website: pure HTML, PHP, CMS, custom engines, static generators, cloud platforms.
And I came to a rather simple conclusion: no ideal engine exists. Sooner or later, any engine begins to annoy you with its limitations.
Perhaps that’s precisely why this blog has already survived twelve reincarnations.
