History
Welcome to a blog that I have been sporadically writing for since the early days of the Internet. The oldest post here is from 2002 and is just a link to an open-source library that I was interested in. I was basically microblogging before Twitter existed!
At the time I was a computer scientist at HP Labs, and I set up this personal blog on a Wordpress instance on a shared server in one of the early hosting services.
As I started to do more web programming, I ended up porting the blog to a client-side only version built with my own custom static generator, JavaScript, and CSS. It was pretty ugly.
One or two versions later it was a Jekyll blog, which started nice and clean but I kept using it as a vehicle to learn new web technologies, and it soon grew into something complex and ugly. Also it became tedious to author posts by writing Markdown in a code editor and publish from the command line.
And now the Fediverse and Mastodon are a thing, and so I've made one more switch, this time to a self-hosted version of WriteFreely, which federates with Mastodon. It is also based on Markdown, which made it possible to port over all my posts, and has a nice online interface which is much better authoring experience than I had before.
Hopefully all this means that I will write more frequently. You can follow me by searching for eob@eamonn.org in Mastodon and then clicking the Follow button.