New Year, New Focus

I've been something of a digital hermit my whole life.

Until a few days ago I have had no social media of any kind (including the most deranged of all social media, Linkedin) and I've treated this blog mostly as a virtual fence to toss over my programming / tech wins, along with making a nice habit to try teaching concepts even if the teaching is to an empty digital lecture hall. You can now find me at this profile on Bluesky. Recently however I've taken to writing larger form pieces, notably my Git Training Grounds project, my reflections on PR process, and switching from Windows to Linux, and I have a few more in mind that will take considerable time but I'm rather proud of.

This blog will remain ad free, open source, with no tracking or popups of any kind, and the only financial kick back being my "Buy Me a Coffee" link on the about page. I pay a whopping 12$ a year or something for this domain so I think I can carry that cost. The content will likely be more frequent too as I feel less pressure to write big stuff here but instead document the small learnings. I've been working on a stock price analysis application for example that I'd love to write about more.

This new website will be called Liminal Tide and will be the main place I post these larger "articles" and things that took significant research and work. It will also have a scope beyond just pure programming as I've been venturing into 3D modeling and 3D printing. Expect some fun work on the interface between those two technologies.

The big technical difference is it will likely make use of Ethical Ads to have one ad with no tracking and some possible affiliate links if I can get any from someone besides Amazon. Based on some initial research it looks like I can keep the site source code open source to prove my minimal ad and tracking implementation, and then pass in all my private account configs via env variables in the hosting platform.

I despise ads and block them in every way possible, so my goal here is to develop a website of my programming knowledge and research but that is built in a such a way that if I saw it without an uBlock Origin I wouldn't instantly close it. No hate if you browse it with uBlock on still, I get it.