About Me

About Me

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, old-tech motorcycles… 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!

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 on my server, though I front with CloudFlare to help deal with bandwidth surges. Being entirely static content (for the bulk of the content), it caches very, very well, and any sort of traffic spike is almost entirely serviced out of the cache.

I’m using an embedded Discource instance for comments - also self hosted. It’s a slick enough setup, and that also runs the attached forum.

If you want to get in touch with me, I’m a big fan of emails of the form “first initial, last name, at my domain.”