I’m Russ - and this is my quiet little corner of the internet, in which I try to keep alive the art of blog posts (with text and photos, not video), long form writing, and a healthy disregard for the insanity of modern technology and life.
You’ll find all sorts of things on my blog - I restrict it to “That which I’m interested in or have done.” And, living on a few acres of rock out in rural farm country, there are plenty of things that interest me and that I work on! Old tractors, solar, battery packs, low tech solutions to modern problems, old cars… you’ll find plenty here, but if it feels like there’s no particular theme like many blogs have, that’s because there just isn’t. Hopefully you find some of it interesting!
Unfortunately, this is very much a work in progress, because in my reliance on Google for hosting my blog previously, I neglected to remember that they do enjoy breaking things for the sake of “change” - and they badly broke Blogger, at least as I used it, to rush to some modern, mobile-first grade rubbish that’s objectively bad at being a blogging interface now.
If you’re curious about the tech stack for this particular setup, it’s as bulletproof as I can reasonably make it. After much pain, my Blogger posts have been converted to Markdown and images collected. I’m using Jekyll to render the blog content into static HTML, with few plugins to handle responsive images (not feeding huge images to mobile devices, and helping keep bandwidth low). I’ve got a few Python scripts banged up to do some post formatting as well before rendering to publish.
Hosting is Google Cloud Storage buckets - which are a great option for static website hosting. I’ve got CloudFlare sitting in front of that, which both caches popular content (saving me bandwidth costs) and, because of interconnect agreements, is far cheaper (1/3rd the cost per GB!) when pulling data out of Cloud Storage. If that hosting arrangement becomes a problem, I can just upload files somewhere else and be on my way.
