The Making of This Blog

It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up.

Excerpt From 1984, George Orwell

After pondering for a long time on what the first post should be about, I decided it should be meta.

Technology

The setup is pretty basic. I’m using Hugo to generate static HTML pages which are served using NGINX, because I love writing in Markdown and I already use it for all types of notes in my workflow. I wanted something light and simple without the overhead of a full blown CMS, thus chose a Static Site Generator.

I had to choose between Jekyll, Hugo and GatsbyJS. GatsbyJS was pretty impressive, but it is a little more complicated than the other two. Hugo was perhaps the simplest of the lot. It is a single binary and pretty damn fast.

The theme is Etch with a few changes. The theme itself, is very simple. There is not even pagination as of now.

I’m a staunch privacy advocate. That being said, I also like statistics and data. For analytics, I’m using Ackee, a self hosted, privacy focused analytics tool. It is configured to collect only the following data, by default:

• Page view counts
• Page referrers
• Page durations

It takes the IP and useragent, salts and hashes them to generate a user identifier. The salt changes for every 24 hours and is not stored anywhere except the memory (RAM). Plain IPs/useragents are not stored at all. Check Ackee’s Anonymization docs for more info.

It is not configured to collect any personally identifiable information like screen dimensions, browser name, os name etc.

If you wish to block these privacy respecting analytics, you can add the domain https://a.rdi.sh to your blocklists.

Content

As you’ve probably already guessed from the name of the blog¹, the content here will be mostly computer security related. I’m passionate about various facets of computer security, privacy, cryptography and general programming. I will try to post fairly regularly, at least one or two posts a week and keep the content diverse.

So that’s about it, just another computer security blog. Thank you for reading.

- 0x5FC3