Guillermo Garron's blog
After going through WordPress, Movable Type, Jekyll, and Middleman, I decided to build my own static site generator in PHP, with help from Claude Code. In this post I'll document how it works, its philosophy, and where it currently stands — plus how I'm using it to run my three blogs: garron.me/en, …
Back in 2016, I decided to lace up my running shoes and start running again. I had taken a long break due to heavy workloads that dragged on from 2013. Starting again wasn't easy, but year after year, I kept pushing and slowly built up my annual mileage. Then, in 2023, I added a bicycle to the mix, …
After years of using Middleman to generate my blog at garron.me — which had come from WordPress for a short while and Jekyll for a longer one — I made the decision to move to something simpler. I have less time these days and maintaining it was becoming impossible. I had the whole stack installed in…
In 1996 I was hired at ENTEL, the national telecom company of Bolivia. Within a few months I was running the Internet department for the largest city in the country. I was responsible for two Linux servers handling mail, web, and FTP, a Unix machine running DNS, and a rack of Cisco routers. That was…
The winter is arriving in the south, and cycling is not that fun anymore. And I know that, to anyone living in places where real cold happens, 13 degrees Celsius is nothing. But it is uncomfortable for me, as I am used to temperatures between 25 and 35 degrees. So, for these months, I have shifted t…
I had promised myself not to buy another bike. I’m completely out of space for more bikes, but this one was impossible to say no to. I was having lunch at Shopping Pinedo in Asunción, Paraguay, when my friend Mauricio sent me this message: Offer Brand: TREK Model: Singletrack 970 (high-end bike) Tru…
These days, AI is helping everywhere and with every possible task. From answering simple questions to writing full books, and in the case of blogging, even writing complete posts. In this case, I used it to improve the way I work when publishing on this blog. I asked Claude Code to create a PHP appl…
Testing the site again, just to know it is working, if it is, I will start blogging again. Or at least that is the idea.
A few weeks ago a friend put up for sale a Gary Fisher he had just finished restoring. The bike looked amazing, with high-end parts everywhere, but I couldn’t afford it the way it was built. Besides, I already had some good components sitting around. So we made a deal: he sold me just the frame and …
A couple of weeks ago, while scrolling through Marketplace, I stumbled upon a bike that immediately caught my attention — a classic 1999 Specialized Hardrock Comp FS made from chromoly steel. It wasn’t in perfect condition; a few parts had been swapped out over the years, and not all of them were in…
Among the bikes in my collection, there are some real gems: a 2008 Stumpjumper, a 1995 Giant Iguana, and a Univega Alpina 5.5 with a straight top tube that I ride with my daughter. But there’s one bike that rarely gets the spotlight, even though it serves one of the most important roles in my routin…
Not everything that gets old becomes obsolete. Some things just earn character with time. That’s exactly how I feel about my Specialized Stumpjumper, a mid-2000s hardtail that still delivers more than I ask of it. This particular bike has a bit of a story. It was originally bought by a friend of min…
I have just bought this beautifull Giant Iguana from 1995, it is full Chromoly. Introduced during the rise of recreational mountain biking, the Giant Iguana stood out in the mid-90s for offering a surprisingly capable ride in a modest package. Its chromoly frame delivered a supple yet responsive fee…
Since October 2022 I have started riding my bike again, I used to ride a lot when I was young, then for lot of years I just forgot about it. It all started again because of some protesters on streets, because of them I needed to use the bike to go to work, then I started to ride just for the fun of …
Why Change I have stopped writing to my blog because I run into a big issue. My company forbidden me to install any kind of software in my Laptop, and that off course include Linux on it. I started blogging again when the pandemic started mainly because 100 Days to Offload project of my friend Kev Q…
Introduction In the beginning, there were single servers, servers on which operating systems ran. They enabled the use of expensive machines by a lot of people using multi-user and multi-task operating systems. But there were cases in which an application had special needs in terms of libraries or a…
Introduction What is Mastodon? Mastodon is a social network, but not any social network, it is a decentralized one, so you can consider it as a Twitter, but not owned by anyone. What's more, much the same as Twitter, is a micro-blogging platform, meaning you have a limit of characters, 500 by defaul…
While on Mastodon today I found this post, and wanted to share my most used commands too. So, after running this command: history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10 This is the output: 99 git 49 cd 38 vim 35 docker 34 middleman 26 sh 16 exit 10 ssh 8 ls 8 curl Now is your tu…
I am on my second running month after the world lockdown, I am making slow improvements, but the good news is that I am improving. But the really best part is that I am enjoying again being outside and running. I am taking care to keep social distance to avoid getting infected with Corona Virus, as …
Since Kev started with 100 days to OffLoad challenge, I have written a lot more, specially at the beginning, but apart from writing, I have also read a lot more. I followed a lot of blogs, but I read some of them more than the others, and interacted with the authors too. And now they have finished t…
Introduction I have tried to stay away from Google Analytics since 2013, I have explored some Google Analytics Alternatives, because I wanted to avoid setting cookies on my visitor's browsers. I have installed Pikik, now known as Matomo, also in 2013, and run my self-hosted instance for some years, …
15 years On May 1809, Bolivia was the first nation where an uprising upset against Spain occurred, from that point onward, in 1810, Argentina follow our steps, and proclaim its independance, it was not all that simple for us. We had the "Cerro Rico" and the spanish were going to battle for it, so fo…
Introduction There are a lot of blogs on the Internet, most of them with very few visitors, this blog only gets a few organic visitors per month, and this type of articles are read by handful persons. Today I stumbled upon Your Blog is Your Avatar post. And the author is right, when you write public…
Today I do not have any interesting idea to write about, I am not planning, I am just writing. This month I have written a lot less than the months before, 30 posts in May, 22 on June, and counting this one only 10 posts in July. That was mostly because I have worked Dockerizing Everything, trying t…
Introduction I have started to be more conscious about privacy over the Internet, and one of the most important aspects to take care of when talking about privacy and security is where to store your passwords, as important as what passwords you use. Most people (including me until some weeks ago) us…
Introduction In 1998 at my first job, I was the system administrator of the biggest Internet provider in Bolivia, it still is the biggest provider. The Internet arrived here in 1995 or 1996, so it was just starting. I was in charge of BGP routers, with a satellite connection to the Internet, the who…
Introduction Yarmo Mackenbach started today a series of posts about ELIUF, what is this all about can be read better at his blog post. But the basic idea is to explain what a decentralized Internet is to people that are not used to that concept, but rather to quite the opposite, a completely central…
Introduction There was a time when the Internet was a Network of small computers interconnected running different services, mainly web servers, email servers and DNS servers, oh, and FTP cannot be forgetten. In those days, a network failure or power outage only affected a small portion of the Intern…
What are AMP pages AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and actually is just a sub-set of HTML aimed at creating: Websites Ads Emails And surely more applications to come, it is a Google product, yes it is Open Sourced, but strongly backed by Google, that it almost belongs to it. As said the HTM…
Introduction As I told before, I have this idea of putting everything I can to run from Docker containers, I am not sure that is the best way to do it, but I am doing it nonetheless. What I have done until now, is create service containers, which are containers that keep running as service daemons, …
Introduction Since I installed Webmentiond on docker and later Wallabag, I have decided to move Miniflux and also host Bitwarden myself, everything on Docker. The other services I have on my server is a Wordpress Blog and three static sites. Before the switch my setup was as follows. Nginx server in…
I began running in 2010 more or less, but I have never take it serously, so my improvements were not as good as they might be. Anyway, In 2019 I have run 274 Km in the whole year, I use Endomondo for tracking, and I have decided to run maybe 300 km this year. I have had a good start with 74 Km in th…
What is a featured image A featured image is used in blogging in two ways, one is in the blog itself and the other is the use in social media. The image usually represent and idea of the post itself remember: An image worth a thousand words Many Wordpress and Ghost themes use the feature image to pr…
Introduction In my last post I talked about about reading, and two of the tools I use to keep up with it. One of the biggest problems we have when surfing the Internet, is that when we find something interesting we don't have the time just then to comfortably read the whole post, and later when we f…
Introduction Blogging is not only about writing, it is also about reading, blogging is a lot about interaction. We used to say: I write, because I like, and I do not care if someone read my blog or not. Well, that is usually not true, we do like being read, and most of our readers are other bloggers…
Introduction Maybe all readers of this blog (very few people) already know what Webmention is, but if for any reason someone else happens to stumble upon this site, then I will explain a little bit. Webmention is a web standard for mentions and conversations across the web, a powerful building block…
This afternoon was a movie afternoon, I am not a movie person, but there are some movies I really like, actually very few. Saving Private Ryan Black Hawk Down Tombstone 1993 Those are maybe the only movies I have seen more than just one time, reading the titles again I realize I may like a little of…
Introduction I am not going to discuss about whether logging visitors is a good or a bad practice, I am going to assume that this has already been analyzed and decided, and that the final decision is that logging visitors and statics is needed. With that defined, now comes the question, which loggin…
Auto-approval in webmentiond I've thinking about implementing your solution since I started with webmentions, I think I will try to do it this weekend, I am not that good at docker, but will follow your instructions. Wish me luck.
After so many days staying at home, today after the dinner I went out for a walk, it was 24 Celsius outside, the wind was a not so quiet, but the streets were. Just a few people outside, it is windy the winter has just started and even though is not cold yet, here in Santa Cruz, a city in the border…
Introduction Logging, well a lot of people, including me, say that we should write just for the passion of doing it, not because of getting likes, or favs, or even being read. But the reality is that if that were the scenario for the most of us (it is for some) we would be writing on paper, and keep…
Holiday Today was a holiday in Bolivia, it is the Aymara's new year, because our last president was backed by aymara people he modified the constitution of the country and other laws in order to insert a lot of symbols belonging to them. That would have been great if the purpose would have been that…
Introduction On April 25th and following Kev's post I started this blog with Why I have a blog post, more or less at that time Kev also started this idea of 100 days to offload and invited everybody on Fosstodon to join. I jumped in that day. Achievements Personal Achievements After 57 days, and 51 …
Introduction Those who use a static site generator to blog, know that we do not have an integrated editor to write our posts. I mainly use vim to write my posts, when on the iPad I use iA Writer, and now on Windows and Linux I have started using Typora. Markdown Markdown is a creation of John Gruber…
Introduction The other day one of the post of my other site was posted on reddit, and one of the readers commented that my site was unusable with No Script. Well the whole problem was that I've got the wrong configuration of PageSpeed Module, and the site entered in an infinite loop. Anyway, that ev…
Introduction My city is arriving in two more days to a span of three months locked down, I have been doing home-office since the first week, going out just one day a week to buy groceries. The police and the army were in control of streets the first weeks, after that there were only control on some …
Like of: How Does Mastodon Work?
Like of: Permanent Writing vs. Temporary Writing
Introduction I’ve been looking for a way to write on the iPad, I mean a way to blog from the iPad. My blog is a static site, I manage it using git, so I needed a git client for iOS in order to blog from the iPad. I wrote about that here, in my research I discovered Working Copy App, let me tell you …
GitHub to replace "master" with alternative term to avoid slavery references Today I have read this article from two days ago, I am aware that this is a complicated topic, and that it is usually better not to touch it, specially if you are not going with most of the people. I recognize that there is…