Welcome to my blog!

On the beginning of 2025, in line with my new year's aspirations, I left Twitter. I chose Mastodon to be my new microblogging home on the web. I was asked why I didn't go for Bluesky. I wanted to give a comprehensive response to this, and here it is.

Ever since my first exposure to "the algorithm" (which was many years ago when facebook switched from the chronologic feed to an algorithmic one) [1], I did not like the experience. I remember, neither did many people and there was a push against it. Facebook later made that the hard-default [2]. IIRC they later removed the chronological timeline as it hurt their business as people were spending less time on facebook that way. This hurt their business because it relies on maximizing the time you spend there. The latter was quite addictive and it beat the purpose for which I was on social media; to connect with people. Instead it became a tool of media consumption.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/facebook-news-feed-timeline_b_2821060

I was reading How bad is link rot on my blog? on Terence Eden's blog. It’s an article where he shares his experience tending to outgoing links in his blog. He shares some interesting data on it as well. I encourage you to have a read.

This is an interesting topic. Let me quote some relevant bits for me to set the scene if you're not bothering to read his full post.

Why don't I just cURL the URL and see if it responds with a 2xx HTTP code?

I used to use an automated checker to test my links. But spam sites lie. Lots of the dead sites have been taken over by scammers, spammers, and AI grifters. They return an HTTP OK and then serve up advertising. Yeuch! So now I spend each morning Tending To My Digital Garden and manually checking the links.

I do have another blog, where I write about more serious computer-science stuff. But this one is not that. However, as the now-owner of two blogs on the world wide web, I have a problem. I just don't write that much.

In the first couple years I had my blog, I don't think I've written anything on it, apart from what I plugged into it from my previous scribblings. But I changed the way it looked for a million times. This has been a topic that I've thought about to no particular avail; substance over form.

However, there is more than just substance (content) and form (styling). There is also functionality, utility. I've started thinking about how I can make this blog into a utility that will want to make me use it. Not a man-made-horror addiction-algorithm-generator, but instead something that I will take joy in using, and something that brings everything together on my online life and fills the gaps between what I use to make the web a social place, as well as a knowledge base.

What my personal blog looked like in the past.

Manuel's new years resolution closely resembles what I've been murmuring to myself for a couple years and I have the same wishes.

(...) I want 2025 to be a year where my focus is on the output, rather than on the input. Rather than being concerned with what’s happening out there, I want to focus on what I can control and that is my output, my contribution to my life and the life of others.

I also want to focus more on the analogue. As much as I love the digital world, I think I need to spend more time disconnected in order to restore some semblance of mental sanity. So books, in paper form, are gonna play a huge role in this 2025.

A year with fewer inputs, and more output. This is my hope for 2025. Happy New Year!

on manuel's blog

This is my notes about people I follow on the web. This is an alternate index for people I follow so that I won't have to rely on Twitter to remember they exist, nor have to give them a prerequisite of having an rss feed to stay in my reading rotation.

Legend: I'm tagging links in this article with pound/number sign tips. Click on these tags to highlight all tagged links (Requires JS).

• #rss: an RSS feed, auto-added into my reader.
• #blog: a person's blog
• #roll: a person's index of blogs they read/follow
• #newsletter: a newsletter they may be curating

All feeds tagged with #rss on this page are automatically included in this reader:

A register of places where I had the best ever x, whatever x may be.

We randomly stumbled upon this icecream shop when we were visiting Margate. Really creamy and delicious, so much so that it inspired me to create a best x I ever had log to never forget a place where I had so good of an experience.

This is my index of useful online tools. I have a few tenets: No login, does the job well, doesn't beg you for spare coin.

PNG operations, allows chaining ops. https://onlinepngtools.com/crop-png

I. hate. password. managers. And you should too. Please allow me to teach you to never need them again, not before a quick rant.

Why would I entrust all my passwords to a single service that is continuously proved to be penetrable [1] [2] [3] ?

Why would I risk getting pwned in all of my accounts everywhere when I can just keep them in my brain where they can't be hacked? Am I just so incapable of coming up with good passwords myself?

Is this thing on?