Hello!

Hello! Welcome to my alternative blog.

My first serious blog was also created on Blogger with a different account, and was named "Notable stuff" (筆記筆記). At the time I was intrigued by running virtual machines on computers, to test out different operating systems and Linux distributions (distros). I also had a tendency to explore old Windows versions and other exotic distros, so the posts there were mostly me documenting installation and configuration quirks.

In 2021, I was fed up with Google (forgot the exact reason though) and had the desire to move my blog elsewhere. As a coincidence, static site generators were back in fashion, and after reading a number of related posts on Hacker News, I decided to give Github Pages (a free static site hosting platform) a go. However instead of using a text-to-webpage convertor, I opted to write every line of HTML myself the 90s way. That turned out to be a huge hassle, and was one of the reasons I write new posts scarcely (the other reason being that I was preparing for the university entry exam). There's a snapshot on the Wayback Machine to give you a sense of what it looked like.

Fast forward to 2022, when I started my site afresh, moved to another provider, and decided to write in English only. Why English? I was hoping to post more software reviews, how-tos and occasional tech rants, and the majority of material I read online on those topics were written in English. Therefore to me, writing about them in English was more intuitive than in Chinese, where I would need to translate the jargon or put up with mixed-language content. Posts in those years include my Slackware (Linux distribution) review, a quick post about disclosing influences on your writing and other tutorials.

In 2023 I started to include more personal stuff in my blog, written in Chinese or English. There was a blogging retrospective, a tutorial on following Twitter users in Mastodon, and a writeup about my experience of contributing to Inkscape, a vector graphics editor.

At some point in 2023 I wondered whether other people wrote about my interests in Traditional Chinese. To my surprise, there are quite a lot of Chinese blogs that had posts about Linux and "Free and Open-Source Software" (FOSS), but most of them stopped blogging some time between 2015 and 2021, probably due to the notoriety of social media platforms. There are of course outliers like Ivon, who also started his own blog in 2021 and posted non-stop ever since. Nonetheless, I find the number of posts talking about FOSS in Chinese far lower than I expected. That's why posts after January 2024 are strictly in Chinese.

That's a quick recap of my blogging journey. This blog was born as a part of an English course I'm in, but since my current blog is Chinese-only, this may become where I write English-only posts. Who knows what'll happen?

— ltlnx 2024-10-08

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