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.

The problem(s) with Open Data

📅 Sep 17, 2013 — 🧮 1556 words — 🏷️ tech

To put this blog post into context; this is written by a 25-year-old developer who uses the Dutch open data (https://data.overheid.nl) and doesn't like to read too much. I rather hack tutorials than read specs and I code stuff for the use of the public, i.e.: data needs to accommodate to the common people.

With that out of the way and allowing you to see this from my perspective here goes; the biggest problem(s) with Open Data.