History
Here’s a history of both this site and my prior blogging efforts.
Flopping around with static sites (mid 2026)
- I moved sals.place from Bear Blog to a static site built with 11ty and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
- Then I switched from 11ty to Hugo.
- I later discovered pico.sh and migrated to it shortly afterward.
Sal’s on Bear Blog (2024 to 2026)
I got the itch again and started this current blog on Bear, which was a great way to get back on the wagon.
A break from blogging (2023 to 2024)
I changed jobs around this time and took down my blog. I was excited about the new gig and paranoid that the blog would somehow foil my plans. Maybe someone at the new employer would trace it back to me and think I was immature or unprofessional or weird for writing under a pen name. I wasn’t particularly attached to that blog, so I figured better safe than sorry.
Jekyll & GitHub Pages (2022 to 2023)
I liked the underground, plain-text vibe of Gopher, but something was lacking. A vibrancy, maybe. An openness, certainly. I decided the Web wasn’t fundamentally broken and that I could accomplish my goals just as well by going back to a static website.
See also Sebastián’s post about is journey to Gemini and back:
All I know is that I wanted the goodness of having a personal space, just like in the gemlog. But also I wanted it to be accessible and “open” in a way the capsule wasn’t.
A Gopher phlog (mid 2022)
I think I hit a problem with Gemini and the TLS requirement, got annoyed, and bailed to give Gopher a shot.
A Gemini capsule (late 2021 to early 2022)
The Gemini protocol hit Hacker News, and I got excited about it.
A less-brief Hugo blog (late 2021 to early 2022)
I started another Hugo blog under a pseudonym. I wanted to feel more free to goof off. Did it for a while. Had some fun.
A brief Hugo blog (mid 2021)
I think I started migrating my Squarespace blog to Hugo but abandoned the effort without much progress.
Squarespace (early 2021)
I got a great deal on a Squarespace site and had always been curious about blogging, so I finally gave it a try. I wrote under my real name about work, career, industry stuff, etc.
LiveJournal (2004)
I wrote only a few posts on here. I’d completely forgotten about it until I got an email in June ‘26 congratulating me on 22 years of blogging.