Few notes on this website :
This is the 4th version of my personal homepage, from a technical point of view.
First one was created in 2003-2004 in Php and Mysql and bits of Javascript and CSS, with no framework at all. I remember I tried Wordpress at the time and did not like it, therefore built my own thing... which lead me to become a Web Developer.
Second version was upgraded in 2007, using Smarty and a home-made Php kind of framework. I was using Mootols as Javascript library, remember this one ? I think it was better written than jQuery in many ways.
Posts from 2003-2007 are somewhere on old HDs, I won't dig them out, I think.
Third version, so the one until May 2019, was built with Zend Framework version 1.5 and Bootstrap/jQuery for the front-end.
It was developed in 2008.
Zooomr (a Flickr free copy) was used at some point to host my photos and that was a big mistake because it shot down suddenly with no warning to users. I have copies of the pics that were uploaded there but I am too lazy to re-upload and update the corresponding posts. Maybe I will some day. Maybe not.
Then I have been using Flickr since then with no issue. I am happy to pay for Flickr.
I have not posted since 2014 on this version, mainly because of Instagram becoming my blog platform.
I used Instagram, Runkeeper, Flickr APIs to feed the site.
This third version of the website has always been nicely hosted on Dreamhost with maybe only a couple of hiccups in 10 years and that was a long time ago. Dreamhost is a solid hosting service.
Now, this current and fourth version is built with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. RoR has been my working tool of choice since 2015.
No front-end framework — Tailwind CSS for styling, Stimulus for the occasional JavaScript, and Turbo for navigation. Importmap keeps things bundler-free.
I imported all my data from Instagram, Strava, the previous MySQL blog database and YouTube with rake scripts.
The site is deployed on Digital Ocean using Docker containers, orchestrated with Kamal. No more SSH-and-pray — each deploy builds a fresh image, pushes it to the registry, and Kamal handles the zero-downtime swap on the server. Code is on GitHub in a private repository.
A Stories section aggregates my Instagram stories in a private timeline. It requires signing in — I keep it behind authentication to retain some control over what I share publicly versus with people I know.
This website contains French, English and 日本語 because these are the languages I use daily.
I don't master any of them unfortunately, so beware of my broken writing skills.
I will mostly use English, but some posts and videos are in French or Japanese with no translation.
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Last update : 2026/03/21