Published on · 3 min read
Welcome to this blog
First things first: why this blog exists, how it's built, and what you're in for, from tech to video games, confessions included.
For a while now, my digital business card has gathered my email address and my online profiles. Great for finding me, useless for reading me. What I was missing was a place of my own to dig into the subjects I care about, free from any platform, its algorithm, or its ads. This blog is that place, and as tradition demands, its first article is about... the blog itself[1].
Why write here
Because social networks chop thoughts into confetti, because a thread vanishes as fast as it appeared, and because a text on your own domain will still be readable in ten years. Which cuts both ways, since my mistakes will age just as gracefully. I'll write about tech in the broad sense, the project management I practice for a living, video games, and a few less tidy confessions, hence the "(not so) private diary" on the home page. No editorial calendar either: I'll write when I have something to say, which conveniently doubles as the world's best excuse for going quiet. French comes first, English second, and every article exists in both languages.
Under the hood
The site is fully static, generated by Eleventy and dressed by Tailwind CSS, with no client-side framework whatsoever: your browser gets HTML, one stylesheet, and a handful of small comfort scripts, not an app with delusions of grandeur. Fonts are self-hosted, code highlighting is baked in at build time by Shiki, and search runs on Pagefind, whose index is also built ahead of time. Writing an article means dropping a Markdown file:
---
title: Welcome to this blog
description: Why this blog exists and how it's built.
date: 2026-06-10
tags:
- blog
---
The content starts here.
Everything else takes care of itself, since the CI pipeline builds the site and ships it to my server on every push. A lot of engineering to, in the end, publish text. You get the idea[2].
Creature comforts
I spent time on the small things that make reading pleasant, and this article doubles as the demo:
| Feature | Where to see it |
|---|---|
| TL;DR and table of contents | At the top of the article |
| Reading progress bar | At the top of the screen |
| Footnotes | Along the way |
| Search and archives | In the footer |
On top of that come the dark theme, the estimated reading time, per-language Atom feeds, a copy button on code blocks, and images served in several sizes, as AVIF whenever the browser cooperates:
And your privacy
Almost nothing to declare: no account, no cookie, no ad trackers, not one request to a third-party service. I only count visits with an anonymous tool hosted on my own server, the digital equivalent of a foot-traffic counter at a bookstore door, all spelled out in a privacy policy that takes itself admirably seriously for a document with almost nothing to regulate. Read here the way you'd read a book borrowed from a friend, no library card, nobody looking over your shoulder.
What comes next
New articles will land at their own pace. The Atom feed is there if you want them delivered, and if one of them makes you want to talk back, my business card lists every place where you can, praise and pushback equally welcome. The diary is open. Now I just have to keep writing in it.