13 Years of Blogging

Just over thirteen years ago, while working in tech support at a local web hosting company, I published my first article on this blog.

I chose WordPress because it was what our customers were using, and I wanted to understand why it was so popular.

Hosting it myself also gave me somewhere to practice setting up servers. I started with a LAMP stack, then replaced Apache with Nginx and MySQL with MariaDB. I learned to compile PHP, run it, and understand the differences between running it as mod_php and PHP-FPM. Having my own site to experiment with taught me a lot about how hosting works.

I wrote down what I was learning so I could find it again when I needed it. Public documentation for myself, more or less. If it helped someone else along the way, even better.

My first posts were in Croatian. Later I switched to English, mostly because writing about things I already knew seemed like a useful way to practice the language. Reaching more people was a nice side effect, although reach was never the point of this blog.

In early 2021 I switched to Hugo . I still liked WordPress, but wanted to try a static site with fewer things to maintain. I hosted it on S3 and CloudFront and later automated the deployment .

Over time, the blog became a test case for newer things I was learning and experimenting with. When I was learning Python, I rewrote its Lambda@Edge request rewrite function in Python . When I wanted to try Azure Static Web Apps, I migrated the whole blog there . And now I’ve come full circle, back on AWS S3 and CloudFront. :-)

Thirteen years later, having somewhere to write my ramblings down still seems like a good enough reason to keep going. :-)