About

Me

Raúl Santos

Hi, I’m Raúl. Thank you for wanting to know more about me, though I’m afraid you won’t find much on the personal side, since I’m acutely aware of the dangers of sharing your personal life online. When I started my online presence back in the 90s, this would not be a problem, and I used to share a lot more about me. Back then, the internet was a friendly place. Nowadays, not so much. As with everything good human beings put their hands on, we also ruined it, and now we have to be careful and not give too much about ourselves away.

A short list of facts about me I can share:

  • I live in Portugal.
  • I am an environmentalist at heart.
  • I am an animal rights defender.
  • I am a very active and social person who loves to do several recreational sports.
  • I started playing with computers when I was 4 and started writing some code when I was 7.
  • I love sci-fi and fantasy.
  • I grew up watching the original Star Wars movies since I was 4, and because of that, Star Wars > Star Trek, though I also love the latter very much.
  • I pay the bills by telling computers what to do and hoping they follow my instructions faithfully. Some people call it software engineering.

This site

This is my personal site. It’s where I write my blog, list my projects, and occasionally publish something useful. It’s also a constant experiment, so if something looks broken, that’s usually why.

It isn’t a Javascript application. Pages are only sensible HTML and modern CSS, with tiny bits of JS sprinkled where they actually add value: search, the language filter, and remembering your light/dark choice. Switch JS off and the first two simply disappear instead of breaking, while the light/dark toggle carries on working. Take that, React, Vue, Next, Nuxt, and all your insane cousins. And yes, that’s a position statement 😉

At its current web address, this site has existed since 2002. Before that, since 1996, it lived on other platforms (Geocities, anyone?).

It has had four names over the past 30 years.

The very first name was “Merentz Home Page” (don’t ask, teenager stuff).

From 2002 until mid-2008 it was a mix of English and Portuguese, under the title “1001 ways to save the world”.

Then I switched to Portuguese only and gave it a title to match, “Já não vou salvar o mundo”, roughly “I’m not going to save the world anymore”. It cost me a PageRank of 4, down to 0 in about four months.

Neither decision fully held. Now there are many posts in both English and Portuguese, and these days the site just carries my name.

Tech history

The site started as hand-written plain HTML and CSS back in 1996, first hosted on my ISP’s web space, later on Geocities, and then my own servers.

Once I had my own servers, I sprinkled some PHP on the site, a language I now refuse to touch. It powered a rudimentary commenting system before the scourge of spam bots came along, as well as a custom CMS and templating system.

Later on, I installed Wordpress and tried it for a bit, but quickly realised the mess it was (spoiler: it still is) and dropped it.

I moved over to Drupal, which was much better, and it was the foundation of the site for several years.

But I got tired of maintaining Drupal, and sometime during 2016, I decided to move the site to a static site generator. I tried many, from Jekyll to Pelican, to 11ty, to Astro, and even Next (holy shit, what was I thinking?). The JS ones were the typical insanity you can expect from the JS world (yes, that’s another position statement). Jekyll and Pelican were alright but a bit slow. I eventually settled on Hugo, which is still the engine behind the site, while I attentively watch Zola as a potential simpler and better replacement.