A decade later... new website... again

There was a time when I used to express myself more often on the internet, and I’ve had multiple websites throughout the years where I posted the projects I was doing or collaborating on. Those websites were hosted at Tales Translations, a community dedicated to fan-translating video games, mainly of the Tales of series. I was one of the founders and I worked on multiple translations. Years went by and it happened what it usually happens, it ended up being abandoned and inactive. That also affected my website, which has been offline for years and I haven’t done much about it.

Years later, I have decided to rescue that website. I want to keep showing the stuff that I’ve done and keep doing, along with some olf stuff that were never in my old websites. Hopefully this website is here to stay for a longer time and I will have the motivation to keep updating it. Maybe I will also write articles about stuff I think or that I’m learning.

For this website I decided to use a so called static site generator, a way of developing a website that I discovered recently that allows to have a somewhat complex website without the need of databases, PHP, and similar things. This way, one of the biggest advantages is that I won’t need to worry about updates, vulnerabilities, hacks, and all that jazz. To be specific, I used Hugo to make the website along with a template called Blowfish, to which I have contributed several bug fixes that solve some issues I stumbled upon. Another advantage is that I can host the site on GitHub completely free, as they offer that free service for static sites.

However, one disadvantage of using this is that it is harder to have dynamic content like comments, contact forms, etc. If possible, I would like to preserve the comments of my previous websites. I have investigates some comments systems, but none of them fully convinces me. Some of them like Disqus are very popular, but slow down the site, are heavy, collect user data (like everyone nowadays…), and if you don’t pay they add ads. Other systems allow you to host your own database, but it requires having some server to host it. I have my own VPS, but my intention was to reduce costs and the maintenance it requires. The one that convinces me the most is one called giscus, which is free and open source, and the comments are hosted on GitHub. The main disadvantage? You need a GitHub account to comment, which is something you can’t expect from non-developer people, and you can’t properly migrate comments from other systems. So I will leave comments disabled for now and let’s see if I come up with something.

For now I have migrated the content of my previous websites, and I will add more stuff I’ve been doing since

So I hope my new website is somewhat interesting and hope you have a nice day!