I’ve been cleaning up my website and blog after having neglected it for several years. I briefly considered switching from Jekyll to Hakyll (you may recall that I switched from Wordpress to Jekyll in 2010) due to the annoying Ruby dependency. But I discovered that installing Hakyll would result in an even more annoyingly large dependency:

$ sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends libghc-hakyll-dev
[...]
0 upgraded, 122 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 49.0 MB of archives.
After this operation, 469 MB of additional disk space will be used.

In the process of cleaning it up, I have found it interesting to observe how my writing skills and values have evolved. It’s also hard to believe that I have stories here stretching back to 2007, when I was the ripe old age of 14 years old.

I have also found it fun to discover mockups and images I made over the years, bitrotting away in this blog’s Git repository. For example, here is a mockup I made for the Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” kdm login screen in 2007:

Gutsy KDM Login Screen

I don’t think this mockup ended up becoming the final release. I think we were still using KDE 3.5.x at the time, and this may have been the release in which Kubuntu went purple.

As part of the clean-up, I’ve ditched Disqus and migrated to a static comment solution. There are several reasons for this. First, I strongly dislike their “Around The Web” discovery links (though not as much as the hatred I feel for “Taboola”’s) and don’t want to support their business. Second, Disqus slows page loading down. Finally, I wanted to make things a bit more difficult for people to comment, because I got tired of commenters fighting amongst themselves. Hopefully the act of having to email me your comments will discourage such behaviour. I’ve ported some of the comments over, but left most to die in Disqus land.