3 years of blogging

29. December 2025

On this exact day 3 years ago, I published my first blog post. Then, I published a new blogpost every month to a total of 38 posts.
Enjoy the last post of 2025 about the blog itself!

Getting better at writing

A big goal when I started this was to get better at writing in English. I think over the time my writing got better. I make less mistakes and can structure my thoughts better into words and sections. This makes writing much more enjoyable, because now I can focus on what to write. I still make mistakes of course, but in the days of LLMs that makes a blog human, I guess ;-)

In the meantime I started also writing some small devlogs for my game 99Managers. Having 3 years of "blogging experience" gives me the confidence to write more and more.

No tracking needed

I do not use any form of tracking on this website or any other software I publish. Technically, I can see the Caddy web server logs, but also there I just see what files are accessed. Therefore I cannot really distinguish between bots and normal users.

So I use the Google Search Console to see what gets the most impressions and clicks on Google. This works for every site and just needs a TXT DNS entry to verify ownership of the website. Google tracks the traffic of their search engine anyways and for me this data is enough. I don't have and want to analyze graphs and statistics to understand what readers like.

Anyway the best feedback comes directly from the readers. No graph can say "thank you for writing this" or "here I found some cool stuff related to your post".

I am not a lawyer, so do your own research before blindly believing the next paragraph.

This website does not need any cookie banner or GDPR notice, as far as I understood. No personal data is collected, because my Caddy logs drop all personal information. No IP-Address, user-agent or anything similar is collected. Only the requested file, the time-stamp and the HTTP response code are logged. I also don't use any third party css or fonts that would expose the readers IP to third parties. And of course, no JavaScript or anything that could communicate over the network runs here.

If you use uBlock Origin, you can see that nothing gets blocked here. There are not many websites that do not trigger any uBlock block, but they exist: Lichess and Mastodon are my favorite examples.

Nowadays cookie and consent banners are so invasive and omnipresent, that most don't know that you can run a website without them.

My best posts

According to the Google Search Console my best posts are the following

Like in every other search optimized ecosystem, niche content gets the most traction. There is not much on the web about using SwayWM on Debian or Neovim with Godot. So sharing whatever niche things you use or work on could make sense, if you care about visibility.

But I do not really care about what performs best, it's just interesting to see, sometimes. If I would care too much, the chase for the next niche article would ruin everything.

Own your place on the web

Having a personal website or a blog means that you can control a small part of the web. With control, I mean real full control. Using social media or any other type of third party platform brings some risks. Let's put aside all the privacy issues (except Mastodon <3) and ethical problems. One day the platform will become old and people move to a new one. Or it changes policies and you have no longer access to your account. [Put any social media platform here] will be obsolete in x years. Your website not. There are many other reasons, having full control of your space is important.

With your own blog you can also shape the web a little bit in the direction you want. For example by choosing to not use any tracking and make weird looking websites. I really have to improve on that, my website looks too boring ;-) I was and am still a big fan of brutalistwebsites. Maybe this site gets more brutal too one day.

Hetzner + Debian + Caddy + Zola

This is my tech stack for all my current websites. In my opinion, having a simple stack is really important. It needs less maintenance, has less problems and will work for longer.

The best choice I made in my opinion is to use a static site builder, like Zola. I chose Zola because I already knew Hugo, but found Hugo too bloated. Everything is written in Markdown and converted to static HTML files, served by Caddy. If one day I want to switch to another tool, I can simply move the markdown content there.

As webserver I chose Caddy, because I used it in other projects at work. It has an easy SSL setup, with LetsEncrypt and I never had any issues or crashes yet. It might take some time to setup correctly the first time, but once it runs it is a pleasure.

All mentioned above runs on Debian on the cheapest Hetzner VPS currently available. I never had any issues with this setup. To note that I started this website on Github Pages and switched to Hetzner on 18 November 2023. The CPU usage rarely goes beyond 5% and the 20TB of traffic included are really enough. I rarely reach a 10GB per month, but I do not host videos and make sure all images are webp.

Oh I nearly forgot: I deploy everything with a simple rsync command. No CI or similar can beat the simplicity of one single command.

Final words

Thank you all for reading this and all other posts during the last 3 years! I hope you enjoyed it and start to create your own space on the web too, if you haven't already.

All the best,
Simon