After I spent quite a lot of time figuring out everything about how Hexo (the software I use for generating my blog) and the Icarus theme work I was finally able to tame the gods of computer technology and deploy my blog.

This is my first real post. You will see 2 more posts before this one, but I made those for testing the multilanguage stuff and decided to just keep them.

In this post I will talk a bit about my blog and the reasons for doing it the way I did.

Hexo and Icarus

My blog is written using the software Hexo and I am using the Icarus theme for Hexo.

The way Hexo works is that you write your blog locally using markdown files and then you generate static files from this. This has the benefit that almost nothing has to be computed on the devices of the reader and also security vulnerabilities should be limited to a certain amount.

Hexo promises many things including plugins, generators, themes and support for internationalization.

I tried to create a multi language blog, however it turns out that i18n support does not necessarily mean that the software also supports posts in different languages at the same time. i18n in the context of Hexo and Icarus only means that you can change the language of the blog once by using config files.

So I spent two days on making the Icarus theme really multilingual and you can see the result now in my blog. Many things are not yet perfect, but they are good enough for me at the moment. If I would wait until everything works perfectly, this blog would probably never go online.

I also had to spend quite some time to fix the theme on mobile. It still looks shitty, but at least it somehow works. The main problem is that Bulma, the CSS framework used by the Icarus theme comes without JavaScript. However in order for the dropdown to work on mobile devices JavaScript is REQUIRED. Despite many examples floating around I could not manage to get this dropdown to work even after spending a good part of a day looking for a solution.

All in all however I am very satisfied with how it works and from now on it will only get better.

3rd Party Libraries and Data Collection

For now my blog is still relying on loading some 3rd party libs from CDNs. I would like to change that, but I could not figure out how yet.

I am going to definitely change that in the future.

My main concern with the 3rd party libs is that I am putting my readers at risk. While it might sound pedantic in todays online world I do not want to load any 3rd party stuff I cannot control. I already have to rely on a huge codebase, so let’s not make it worse by including scripts which could be changed without me knowing about it.

In general I try to avoid giving away my readers data without their consent. I am planning to include a few more things in the future, maybe Twitter embedding and also YouTube embedding, but I have yet to look at it and find a way to do that without loading scripts from their sites.

I am definitely planning to collect some data myself however. In contrast to most sites I will not do that at the frontend however, but on the server. Hexo generates a static site, so I can good statistics even on the backend. For this I will mainly look at what URL has been loaded and at the IP of the user. That way I can tell which blog posts are interesting for my readers and where my readers come from. Also this will be an exercise for me on how to use the elastic stack in production environment.

About my Translation Strategy

I have chosen to create a bilingual blog in English and German. The reason for this is simply that both language versions are aimed at different audiences. Unfortunately in Austria not everyone understands English. Actually it is quite the opposite. There is a big share of people over 30 who do not understand English enough to grasp the meaning of anything more than the most simple conversations. Especially in the working class few people speak English. Also young people who are not working in jobs that require English skills are sometimes not very good in English.

In short: For some blog posts a big share of the possible audience could not even understand the posts if I would write them in English.

While I could in theory translate each and every blog post this is not possible due to my restricted time budget. So I am going to aim the different languages to different audiences. German blog posts will mainly be written for topics that concern local topics or which I want to be accessible to as many people from Austria as possible.

The English posts on the other hand will deal with all the matter that is international. Whether it be programming, photography, travel posts or any other topic that is not just relevant for Austria, but also for the world.

Commenting on Blog Posts

For now commenting is not possible on my blog. This has multiple reasons. Currently the most important one is: I don’t have time to take care of this. But before I add a comment function I have also to check the legal situation.

You know I live in Austria. Austria has a very old tradition of making laws for each and every thing. This also includes the internet. Although some politicians in Germany and Austria say so, the internet is no lawless space (and by the way has never been). Why do I mention this? Enabling comments on a page is, as far as I know, at least a partial legal risk for me. I have to spend time to delete comments I have to take measures against abusive messages, racism, mobbing and all the other nice things people do on the internet.

Of course my blog is small and and and, but the result of all this is that it takes time. Time I don’t have or better time I want to spend on doing more productive things.

So for now let’s do it like this: I am on Twitter. You can reach me under the username @TobiasWatzl. If you want to make a public comment just post the link to the post you are referring to and your comment and I try to reply.

If you do not have Twitter or do not want to make you comment public you can just write me an email to my blog address twatzl-blog@gmx.at. Please put Comment: <the name of the post here> in the subject and a link to the post in the body. You can also just click the link of the mail address and magic will happen and give you a template.

Famous Last Words

Anyway that’s it for my first real post. I hope you enjoy the content I provide you and wish you all the best for the rest of your day/week/month.

Tobias