Welcome to j11g.com, my personal blog about anything and everything that interests me. So mostly technology, music, books and podcasts. To get started you’ll find a collection of posts from the piks.nl archive and we’ll take it from there.
Why?
Piks.nl has been my main blog for over 11 years. However it started as a pictures site for friends; hence the name. This was in 2005, before Facebook, Hyves, WhatsApp, Twitter, Google Photos and Instagram were around to take care of the challenge of sharing pictures. So when those sites happened, piks.nl became more of a personal blog and less about the pictures. But this presented a couple of problems.
Do tell
First problem: Dutch or English? I made the conscious switch to English a couple of years ago. But the blog name wasn’t really meaningful, especially for English readers and also hosted on a dot nl domain. Secondly: I still want to blog Dutch things every now and then. Mostly local things, politics maybe. But I don’t want to alienate English readers. It kind of bugs me when I follow a blog that occasionally switches to Danish or Chinese (yes, it happens). Lastly: piks.nl is also home to a short URL service and I don’t want to break that. So here is the fix. One blog for Dutch readers, piks.nl which will probably be low volume and another one as the main blog, in English: this one.
Blogs are dead!*
So you say. And I probably get where you coming from. Facebook and other walled gardens like Medium, or even Tumblr, seem to be the norm. But I have a deep love for self hosted (personal) blogs and RSS. They embody the essence of what makes the internet so great. And also, I like writing. So even if nobody reads this, I still enjoy making it.
And I really prefer hosting and owning my own made content. For several reasons. Just one small reason is that I was able to export/import the old piks posts super easy. Because I control the content and database, exporting things written 11 years ago was no problem.
So yes, this is another self-hosted WordPress blog you should really add this your RSS reader!
* I love WordPress, it powers over 25% of the web. And this blog is helping to grow that number.
What’s with the name
Glad you asked! I figured because this is my personal blog it should somehow reflect my name and be short! But guess what, jan.com was taken. So the next best short thing I could come up with was j11g. This is a numeronym; my full name starts with a J and ends with a G with 11 letters in between. So there you go. The j11g is up!
