About

Hi there! I’m Jan, a thirtysomething mechanical engineer, amateur guitarist, and web standards, WordPress and Laravel enthusiast from Belgium, and this is my personal blog.

Questions? Feel free to reach out on Mastodon! (I’m in the process of moving accounts. After years of hosting my own server. Bear with me.)

About This Site

This site is powered by a somewhat unusual pairing of Laravel (the world’s most popular PHP framework) and WordPress (the world’s most popular CMS).

The front end is fully responsive and uses very little, hand-crafted CSS. Only one tiny bit of JavaScript is used: highlight.js, which helps style all of the code snippets around here. That’s right: no build process whatsoever.

Web fonts are served from this domain rather than, e.g., Google Fonts.

Each page is cached—and the cache cleared once a day and on every change—to static HTML for the fastest possible page load times.

Copies of most notes are automatically posted to Mastodon—other social media services may follow.

RSS and Microformats

The /feeds page lists (almost) all feeds available. (Big surprise there.)

Comments and Webmentions

I don’t intend to ever add a comment form below articles, but webmentions are already supported. Additionally, notes that are crossposted—POSSE’d—to Mastodon can be replied to over there. Those replies may then appear on this site as well. I will almost certainly no longer serve comments that weren’t explicitly sent to this very site.

Now Playing

If your browser supports JavaScript, it may show a “Now Playing” widget on the bottom left of every page, which should reflect whatever’s playing on either my main laptop or the media player in our living room. It gets its data from this site’s very own “scrobbling” endpoint. (In short, my media player pushes song information to my web server, rather than, say, Last.fm.)

Privacy Policy

Cookies

This site uses up to three functional cookies, e.g., to prevent CSRF attacks.

Analytics

I don’t do stats. Currently experimenting with (self-hosted) Plausible, to get a feel for what pages are popular, if any. Will probably close down after a couple months. No data is ever shared with third parties. IP addresses are never stored.

Webmention and Aggregated Content

Public webmentions may be linked to or displayed in part or in full. I used to occasionally pull in public replies on Mastodon, too, and may one day revive this practice.