Welcome to the fresh mbz.digital space

Hello world

I’ve set up this site as a space to help shape my digital identity, gather and showcase all the little and big things that I do outside my everyday job.
It is a blend between a profile / portfolio site and a personal blog.
It is a space where I can focus, create and share with people I care, free from the shackles of the big social-media corporations.
It is a constant work in progress, and will change and adapt as I tend to this digital garden.
I plan to share my thoughts on various technologies that I interact with a lot and have a good level of understanding and familiarity with.
I hope to be able to share the results of my photography, gamedev, electronics and various other side projects here.
It is a place where I want to polish my writing / thinking skill and sharpen my content creation skills, in order to be able to tell an interesting and valuable story for the reader/viewer.

What is it running on

I’ve tried various platforms that would fit the needs for this site, and finally landed on Jekyll with a recommendation from a good friend.

It looks like it is lightweight, hacker-friendly and I can fully dig into the layout/css if I so desire. I chose the very nice klisé theme as a starting point and modded the css and templates according to my personal preferences.

At first I’ve tried the good-old WordPress, as I thought that with my old-school PHP/HTML/CSS I can easily bend it to my will and get a nice content management system that I can work with from anywhere in the world. But after initial testing, the ancient WordPress was so slow (and probably created such a huge attack surface) that I set out to look for a modern alternative. Surely it can be made way faster with various caching and optimization doodads, but it was not the simplicity that I was looking for.

Then I thought: Okay, maybe it’s time to finally abandon the ancient ways of PHP and finally embrace the modern webdev tech. I’ve taken a look at the modern node.js scene and stumbled upon the ghost publishing platform. While being very fast and well-designed, it looked like a serious content-production factory - too complex - overkill. Embracing the node.js on this domain would also mean that if I lost the ability to mess around with quick and dirty PHP scripts and I would need to embrace the front/backend JavaScript fully - I felt that I was not ready to give away this convenience.

This is how I landed on Jekyll. Now I have to figure out how to integrate it nicely with the Obsidian note taking setup that I’m using currently and we should be good to go.

The funny thing, I used to hate Markdown in my early webdev days, and now my two main “publishing” tools are using exactly that.

Here it feels like I should have a nice wrap-up paragraph with a feel of closure. Seems like I need to read up on writing techniques!

So instead let me share a nice Tweet about that topic that I stumbled upon:

See you soon!
MBZ