Markus Stocker bio photo

Markus Stocker

Between information technology and environmental science with a flair for economics, the clarinet, and the world of soups and salads.

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After a virtual private server upgrade to Debian 6.0 and a magnificent 1 GB RAM, which is rather awesome from the previous 128 MB, as well as a complete redesign, the blog is finally back online.

Since the beginning, the site had been powered by Wordpress but the guys at Clark & Parsia indirectly convinced me to try something new, being the continuous Wordpress updates, the plug-ins chaos, the requirement of a database, an annoying software cake with too many layers, to run something that ought to be simple.

The site is now powered by toto and thin, and the whole thing, including the text file posts, is versioned at github. The posts are freely available on this site anyhow, so feel free to clone the whole site (some rights reserved). Cloning and pushing the posts from and to github is a rather interesting way to maintain a blog, albeit slightly geeky. The system comes, among other things, with the added benefit of having local copies of the posts, just in case the server crashes (indeed, previously I had no functioning backup of the database).

You may wonder what happened with all the gadgets, such as recommended posts, most recent comments, and other click-apps. Well, they are gone, and they won’t come back, at least not anytime soon. One of my favorite things about this minimalist blogging system is that it supports, in a cool way, what a blog is all about: writing. Indeed, I did not even activate, at least for now, comments, in toto most easily powered by disqus. The main reason is that in over two years I utterly failed to attract comments in first place, and I’m not expecting this will radically change in the near future. (Granted, with shutting down comments I definitively closed the doors.) The second reason is that integrating disqus somehow breaks the clean design, in my opinion. That said, I might consider activating them in the future. However, not all is gone. I left the Twitter button at the end of each post, which is a way for you to interact, including leaving short comments. Further, you can reach me @markusstocker, linkedin, or by email if you want to get in touch.

Finally, there are links to the archives by year for you to browse and a RSS feed for you to subscribe. The banner image has been different from the one I chose back in 2008 for awhile. The current image is a variation of a picture I took a few years ago, in Berlin.