Over the past decade, I have started and abandoned multiple blogs. Each blog followed a very similar recipe, fate and demise:

1. Start with a "here we go again" post to announce that this blog is having a subtle reboot (just as I am doing now).
2. Write a few posts here and there, oftentimes about completely different topics.
3. Lose interest and without a direction for the blog, eventually let it dwindle.
4. Maintain the infrastructure for a few months or years without posting anything, while still being reminded that the blog exists.
5. Find new motivation and immediately goto 1.

The new motivation I have found comes from the fact that I am sharing my email address with various people at my current (and soon-to-be former) job. The address is [...]@geana.io, meaning potentially an influx of visitors over the coming days or weeks. I would like my home on the web to appear tidy and give visitors the impression that I got my shit together.

I am also acknowledging the fact that rebooting the blog every couple of years does not actually add up to anything in the long run. I would like to break that cycle, and instead build this bit by bit into something meaningful.

This has been a problem nagging me for quite some time, even before I started sharing my email address. Since all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking, my dog has given me an abundance of opportunity to think deep thoughts about the whys. So in no particular order, here is my root cause analysis.

Tinkering instead of blogging

My first-ever blog was just a self-hosted WordPress instance. This would have been around 2013 or so. I had no idea what I was doing, but do remember spending a lot of time adjusting the theme to my liking. Unfortunately, most of that work is lost and only survives on the Internet Archive. Why did I find it important to include a blinking caret like in a terminal emulator, or why did I think people would be interested in my Twitter feed appearing on the right? Mainly just because I wanted to tinker with "web" stuff.

The next iteration of my blog was a custom CMS of sorts written in python and django. I remember this period very well. It was right after finishing my Master's degree in September 2015, in the month of downtime before I would start my first "real" job. My wife (back then still only my partner) already had a job and I was bored alone at home. This was enough motivation to redirect my attention to my decaying blog and attempt to resuscitate it back into relevance. Again, most of that work is lost, but the Internet Archive delivers. The look and feel were very similar, but I found it important to code a javascript glider, display timestamps in unix format, and convert them to human readable dates on mouseover. Again lots of tinkering, but not so much to show for on the content side of things.

My memory gets fuzzy from here, but thankfully I kept some of the git repos that followed. Dissatisfied with django, I started rewriting my blog using flask in October 2018, experimented with jekyll in September 2020, switched to gatsbyjs in January 2021, before finally giving up on coding my own blog and deploying Ghost in July 2022. Writing this paragraph reminded me just how ridiculous the journey has been.

Tinkering is a good way to learn, but at the end of the day, very few things matter more than the content when blogging. All the aforementioned visual gimmicks are meaningless, especially in the grand scheme of things over the last decade. I need to stop doing this and instead focus on the writing part.

What content makes an article?

The second problem I faced was not knowing what content to share at which moment. This can be divided into two sub-problems:

1. Is my blog a tech blog, an infosec blog, a place for philosophy and introspection into my day-to-day? Can I mix write-ups of LibAFL pull requests with my experiences of becoming a father? What about my hobby project logs? There were and still are many different topics I want to write about, and it feels inconsistent to mix them all up on this blog.
2. How long should an article be? Should I post quick notes to remind myself of solutions to various problems - e.g. meaningful names to /dev/tty* devices in linux? Am I actually going to remember that I "blogged" my udev configuration after a couple of months? Or should I instead spend some time and flesh out better content?

Answering these required inspiration from other blogs, like th0mas.nl (shoutout to ma' boi!), limitedresults.com, lcamtuf's blog, raelize.com and last but not least my wife's blog brievenuit.nl.

Everyone is free to make their own choices on what to post, and having a framework to fall back on when decisions need to be made can greatly simplify the process. So for myself, I have decided that

1. I will keep geana.io as a personal blog, a sort of online diary for experiences I want to share publicly. It will be a tool to reflect on the problems I come across, regardless whether they are technical or not. Ideally, the articles should have some weight to them and not be simple brainfarts written to boost the numbers when I feel I'm slacking.
2. Content that results from my hobby projects will instead land on blog.lashbits.io. I do keep project logs in a private zettelkasten-type database and maybe some of these will be made public. However, I think I should limit myself to publishing only the projects where I have achieved something worth sharing, as opposed to "here's the 1000th article describing some concept".

A lot of what I considered blogging material will instead end up as notes in the aforementioned database. Keeping consistent will help me find my notes much more easily when I will be in need of them.

Lastly, I have decided not to port any of the old material to this new format. The single article on blog.lashbits.io is the only one to survive this (hopefully final) reboot of my blogging journey.

And with that, here it is - the 2025 revamp! Welcome to geana.io.