Glitzersachen

• Impressum / Imprint
• Datenschutzerkärung / GDPR

This is my personal and professional website and blog. All the opinions expressed here are my own. Opinions of other parties will be marked as quotes. I'm not speaking for my employer nor will I disclose information about and of my employer. Any overlap with their opinions is purely accidental.

The implicit distinction I'm making here — between “for my employer” and “professional” — deserves some explicit explanation. I'm of the opinion that everybody (?) has a profession – what they studied, formally or informally, what they have experience in and what, perhaps, is their calling. This needs to be distinguished from what they get paid for at a given time. If they are lucky, there is an overlap. But even if they are not employed they stay professionals in their respective areas. And if they get paid, that does not make them automatically into puppets of their respective employers.

I mean it in this sense when I say "this is my professional web site”. I'm expressing my professional opinion on topics here, things I've learned from theory or experience. This is independent from what I get paid for by my employer (who, maybe, doesn't share my insights, or, working from a different perspective might even hold totally different opinions).

This site was created with GNU Emacs, GNU Make, Org Mode, some self developed scripts and a self-developed brutalist theme that borrows some CSS from Org Mode.

A former instance of the site had been created with hugo using the self-developed brutalist-minimalist theme, which had been released as free software.

I was not satisfied with the results — which was partly the fault of my CSS skills — and since I've been thinking about using Lisp for templating for some time, I've prototyped this idea now with Emacs Lisp.

Years ago I had a blog (together with a friend). At that time keeping a html request log was still legal – the GDPR didn't exist, which perhaps does not actually forbid keeping a request log but makes it into a sufficiently confusing legal quagmire that it seems safest not to do so without a corporate legal department behind you.¹⁾

Every now and then I had a cursory look into the request log to see from where we were linked. One day I noted that the referrer was a Google search with the keyword “Glitzersachen” (German for “glitter things”). Indeed, there was an article in my blog that contained the word and at the time the blog article in question was in the top five of the Google search hits for “Glitzersachen”.

Two or three mental jumps later the ideas was born to run a blog or web site with the domain glitzersachen.de and the sub title “Glitter things I found at the road side”. I only fully acted on this idea years later, but here it is.

¹⁾ The effect of all this attempts in “data protection” seems to be that it's becoming really difficult for the average civilian to act in the Internet in a role different from that of the pure consumer (that is: Just using big corporate platforms and - ironically - accepting loss of control of your data) whereas the predatory data collection practices of the big players are (a) hardly encumbered (despite all the hue and cry they put up) and (b) get some legal foundation as well (some of these practices were AFAICS downright illegal in jurisdictions with strong consumer protection, now the consumer can (be made to) waive their rights easily by clicking through a consent form).