This Site

Purpose

This is my personal website. It reflects some of my experiences, views, and opinions. That’s it.

You can contact me via e-mail: gray@life-new.me. No, I don’t have either a Twitter nor Facebook account. I value my peace of mind.

The menus at the top are drop-downs, where applicable, but you can also click on the menu item itself to get an overview page. The item on the top left-hand side is the home link.
On narrow mobile phone screens, the main menu itself is a drop-down, with no secondary drop-down from there. This would be awkward. Navigate via the overview pages in this case.
The single posts have little arrow-heads to the left and right that allow you to jump to the next or previous post, respectively. If the screen, or window, is too narrow, the arrow-heads appear near the bottom.

RSS Feed

The latest posts are accessible as RSS feed via https://life-new.me/index.xml.

Dark and Light Themes

Select either the dark or light theme at the bottom of each page. The selection is sticky, but can be different for each web browser you use.

Device Support

Everything from desktop computers with large screens to laptops to tablets and mobile phones should present the contents somewhat decent and navigable.

Browser Support

The site gets tested on recent browsers, namely Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, on macOS, Windows, and iOS. I don’t have access to Android or Linux desktop systems, sorry.

No special efforts are put into supporting ancient browsers. Upgrade. It’s in your best interest anyway, from a security point of view.

JavaScript

In general, all contents is accessible without JavaScript.

JavaScript in your browser is used for

search
changing the theme
displaying images full screen
displaying multiple images as left-right scrollable gallery

As JavaScript is de facto enabled on most users’ devices, a warning message will appear if some functionality is limited if disabled.

Terms of Use

In short, avoiding lengthy legalese, you’re using this website at your own risk, mentally and technically. While I don’t use any tracking (see below), if you visit a site that I link to, they might do so. Also, while on another website, even if I link to it, their terms of use and privacy policy will apply, obviously.

If you don’t understand what the following paragraph means, you’re fine. Enjoy.

This site uses static files only, and all accessible pages are publicly listed in the sitemap.xml file. If you simply read or crawl this site accordingly, all will be fine. I am very strict regarding attempts to access content otherwise, as there’s simply no need for that. If you repeatedly POST to this site, or try to access a script resource such as a .php file, you will be banned for some hours. If you attempt to connect using other protocols than HTTP, you’ll be banned as well. If you’re banned several times, the monitoring mechanics will start to ban you for days.

Privacy

Your privacy is impor… stop the BS. Let me not, as most websites, state that your privacy is important, to then outline on page after page how I undermine it.

Let me just tell you what I do, without weaselly wording.

The theme switcher records the setting in the so called local storage in your browser. It’s simply a text string with the name of the theme, nothing else is recorded, in particular nothing that could identify you.

I don’t use any third party analysis and tracking service. I have decided that I neither need nor want it. Hence, this site does not use any cookies at all, and does not store any personalised data.

See also these posts: No Trackers, Web Server Logging.

Your visits will be recorded in the server log files. I use goaccess to analyse the webserver logs for technical problems, misuse, and attacks.

Infrastructure

The site contents consists of static files, without any server-side processing. The contents files are generated with Hugo on my Mac and uploaded to a Linux server at Linode. This server is also 100% under my control, log files and all.