About this site and its author

The author

Hi, I'm Andy! I'm a tail-end-of-the-Gen-X-cohort computer-toucher and my pronouns are he/him. I've been professionally touching computers since about 1994, generally with job titles like "systems administrator", "systems engineer", "devops", "SRE" and so on. Since 2009 though my full time job has been running BitFolk, a VM hosting company.

Since 2020 I've also been a professional dog sitter! I specialise in looking after my favourite type of dog – sighthounds. Almost all of my dog sitting clients are greyhounds.

On this site I tend to mostly write about technical topics, with the odd personal post mixed in. Over on my Fediverse account things are skewed more towards personal posts and stuff about greyhounds! 😀

Since 2004 I've lived in London, UK.

The site

The strugglers.net domain is quite old —- it was registered in 1998. Back then most people didn't even have Internet access at home, let alone their own web sites and email accounts outside of what was provided by their employer or educational establishment. This site started off being shared by several people, as even the cost of registering the domain was quite high back then.

I've always been the most dedicated user of this domain but over time the other users made their own arrangements or just used other social media for their online presence, until there was just me left using it. Since about 2006 I maintained a blog at /~andy/blog/ but by June 2024 I decided it needed a major refresh. I also decided at the same time to stop pretending that there are actually any other users here. So, I took over the root of the domain.

Software

Starting in 2006 Wordpress was used. The June 2024 migration was to a static site generator called Zola. The old Wordpress site is now archived and articles from it are being moved over, their old URIs redirected.

The site is served from a BitFolk VM running Debian Linux.