About this website

Welcome to my personal website. “edw” stands for “Elias Daler’s Website”.

License

All text content (unless stated otherwise) on this website is licensed under Creative Commons public domain (CC-0) license. The attribution is appreciated, but not required.

The images and videos/gifs are licensed under CC 4.0 BY-SA.

Principles

This website represents what I want many websites to be like: independent, free from bloat and trackers; informative and well-structured.

• This website uses minimal CSS and clean HTML.

  I recommend using your browser’s “reader mode”, custom CSS or extensions if you want it to look fancier or have a “dark mode” look.

• This website doesn’t use JavaScript.

• This website doesn’t track you in any way. All server side tracking and logs are disabled.

  This website is hosted on a VPS by OVHcloud (see below for more detail), which doesn’t guarantee absolute anonymity - I recommend using VPN all the time, anyways.

• This website has no analytics and doesn’t use web fonts (yet another way that third parties track users).

  I wish fewer websites used Google Analytics. Ask yourself, is it really this important for you to know which OS, browser and screen resolution your audience has? Where they come from (precise up to a city level at times)? Which mobile carrier they have? Does it really matter if one of your articles got 10x more views than a less popular one?

• This website doesn’t use embedded elements from websites such as YouTube, Twitter and so on. They insert a lot of trackers into your page.

• This website doesn’t have any affiliate links.

  Next time you open some “best books about X” or “best guitars under 400 USD” list, check if it has undisclosed affiliate links (or it is disclosed, but in small text hidden away somewhere). Sadly, many websites do this and I consider it to be unethical and dishonest.

• This website doesn’t have any ads (explicit or implicit)

  A while ago I had a popular “best programming/game dev books” list on my website. You’d be surprised how often I got approached by authors and publishers to add their book to this list (sometimes with financial incentive) - I always refused to do it.

• None of the content you see on this website is AI generated.

Comments

This website doesn’t have a way to leave comments. I’m happy to hear your corrections (or praise) - please write me an e-mail. I also use GitHub Discussions as a way for people to leave comments. Sometimes I might link interesting discussions about my articles on external websites such as Reddit or Hacker News.

Infrastructure

This website runs on GNU/Linux Debian and uses Apache Server for hosting content.

I write my articles in Markdown and use Hugo to build my website.

If I had more time, I’d run my own server, but I’m currently using VPS by OVHcloud - their reputation is very good and their policies are clear and reasonable.

Some people asked before, but I don’t live in Iceland and I’m not Icelander. I’ve chosen a “.is” domain, because Iceland has a strong commitment to freedom of speech as well as Internet freedoms (unfortunately, it complies with DMCA, which is a shame).

Also read this report by EFF on which Internet registries/TLDs provide the best protection for domain owners. The main takeaway is: many, especially “new” TLDs (such as “.club”, “.site” etc.) offer almost zero protection. A domain can be taken away from you for minor reasons and even alleged copyright violations.

ISNIC’s policies are also pretty clear and don’t contain “gotcha” clauses which many mainstream providers have (which basically allow them to stop providing you services for almost any reason).

Blog format and why I dislike it

All my previous websites were in the “blog” format. I believe that it’s not very good for several reasons:

1. It’s overwhelming for new readers. They find your website and see hundreds or thousands of articles - it’s hard to figure out what to read.
2. Do the articles really need to be sorted by date? I believe that it’s better to have them sorted manually.
3. Sometimes you being to dislike your old content and blogs make it harder to separate them from the content you consider to be your best.
4. Tags help to find the content which is relevant to you, but I believe that something that resembles a file system hierarchy works better (for example, articles/videogame/nes/super-mario-bros.html).

I might rearrange, delete or “hide” some articles which I consider to be outdated or which don’t meet my ever-growing quality standards. I recommend archiving the articles you like using archive.org or saving them to your PC.