Move to Jekyll

📅 Aug 19, 2015 — 🧮 129 words — 🏷️ tech

So I moved my site to Jekyll and Github Pages.
The reason was that I wanted to get rid of my hosted VPS solution which I didn’t use at all. I had great plans of making lots of small websites, but that never really planned out.

I also wanted to get rid of the 500ms page loads of Wordpress (yes, I’m sure you can make that better). All I need for my blog is a static website. I plan to do comments with Disqus.

Dutch Open Hackathon

📅 Sep 25, 2014 — 🧮 1176 words — 🏷️ tech personal

Last weekend I attended the Dutch Open Hackathon in the UP building (previously known as IJ-toren) in Amsterdam.
I went there as part of team 'Pi Ducks'. The team consisted of some colleagues from bol.com (where I started working in July) and a front-end designer we met through Twitter. We had a pretty broad range of skills in one team!

Going on holiday

Our working title was "Ik ga op vakantie en neem mee" which is a Dutch little memory game where everyone has to cite a list of items to bring on holiday, pick a new item and then the turn goes to the next person, who has to cite that entire thing again. N+1.

meter; the HTML5 element

📅 May 14, 2014 — 🧮 427 words — 🏷️ tech web

I'm amazed at how often I still "discover" a new HTML5 element. I say discover because really they're all written down in specs. But then again, who reads specs for their enjoyment?

Today I discovered the meter-element (by first discovering the progress-element). They're essentially the same, except that <meter> also adds some sugary deliciousness in the form of colouring. It's here that you should note that IE10 (and higher) only support <progress> at the moment and not <meter>. So while both elements are rendered pretty much the same by browsers, it's the semantic meaning that you have to pick.

Piwik, a free open-source analytics tool

📅 Mar 5, 2014 — 🧮 250 words — 🏷️ tech

I have been using Piwik for a couple of months and I love it.

I started using it first at my internship at leadelephant.com, not really as an analytics tool, but more as a data collection tool.

The main goal of Piwik is an analytics tool, a direct competitor to Google Analytics. But it's really more than that. Like the data collection method I just mentioned, it could also be a community monitoring tool, which is how we use it at  Habbies.nl.

Akismet doesn't cut it anymore, utilize Cloudflare against spam

📅 Feb 27, 2014 — 🧮 200 words — 🏷️ tech

I have been noticing a severe drop in spam in my comment queue. I used to have to delete anywhere from 5 to 10 comments a day in the queue with just Akismet. Now there's not one comment.. 99.99% of the time.

I didn't really think anything of it until I just realized why this change occurred; I had enabled Cloudflare for my blog.

Road trip to Scandinavia 2013 - Part III

📅 Nov 28, 2013 — 🧮 1426 words — 🏷️ personal scandinavia-2013

Day 6: Preikestolen

Preikestolen is one of Norway's famous touristtrapslocations, it's a hiking trail that ends at the Preikestolen (Pulpit/Preacher's Chair), a slab of rock hanging over the Lysefjord fjord. There's also the Trolltunga (Devil's Tongue) east of Bergen, which is similar just a lot smaller. But we didn't go there.

We had planned the entire day for our trip to the Preikestolen. It had been advertised as a serious achievement, and we weren't that familiar with such hikes. With a mix of GPS navigation and following the signs, we took the "backdoor road" Fv316 (instead of the main road Rv13). This led us through windy hills, small roads and sheep on either side. A far better idea than the highway. Both roads end up in the village of Lauvvik were we took the ferry to Oanes, a 10-minute trip. After the ferry ramp you make a sharp turn and go through a tunnel to the other side of the mountain. After a short while you leave the main road again and take a smaller "mountain road". Here we ended up in a tiny traffic jam; this meant it was the right location.