The Blog

This blog used to be called “Planète Béranger”—for reasons I won’t mention here. For quite some years, my blog hosted literally thousands—over 12,000 posts in 9 years!—of posts on various topics, from Linux and Windows to politics, society and languages. Most of the contents was in English, but French and Romanian were also used.

Some quick facts about the various versions of this blog over time:

• v1—May 2005: hand-made (LAMP) ► beranger.zoom.ro, then beranger.org → 2,726 posts
• v2—May 2007: Blogotext-powered ► beranger.org → 2,973 new posts
• v3—Feb. 2009: self-hosted WordPress → 607 new posts
• v4—Sept. 2009: Tumblr-powered → 4,268 new posts
• Side project—2009: Odiecolon.repo for EL5 (frozen on Aug. 26, 2009, now deleted); it last included 489 RPMs and 269 SRPMs (i586) for clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x
• Side project—2011: Unofficial Mageia Cauldron/2 Repository (frozen on Sept. 20, 2011, now deleted); it last included 45 SRPMs and 100 RPMs (i586 and x86_64)
• July 25, 2011: stopped blogging; v1-v4 were all called Planète Béranger
• 2012-2013: displaying a static archive of 700 posts from what was posted on Tumblr (v4)
• May 23, 2013: side blog beranger.wordpress.com, Der Béranger → 36 new posts (of which 23 “Sprachen Sie Deutsch?”)
• v5—June 12, 2013 (still beranger.org) ► imported 36 posts from Der Béranger and 240 posts from the archive (all labeled “May 13, 2013”); relaunched as Homo Ludditus
• June 16, 2014: 1,480 posts, of which 1,204 new posts
• June 19, 2014: stopped blogging; only preserved 260 posts
• March 1, 2015: a few occasional posts (18 new ones) have been added in the meantime, to a total of 278
• March 5, 2015: following a cleanup, 50 posts have been deleted, remaining posts 228
• March 9, 2015: relaunched after some cosmetic changes (was it v6?)
• May 3, 2015: deleted 45 related to learning German (from 239 posts down to 194)
• January 31, 2016: stopped blogging
• March 3, 2016: deleted everything
• March 7, 2016: relaunched with a new domain ludditus.com (and beranger.org still working for one more year), a new WordPress theme and different plans for the future

❖

Here’s an adapted version of a recapitulative story I posted a couple of years ago–From the history of the old Béranger.org…

The original blog Planète Béranger was alive between May 2005 and September 2009, initially on free, later on paid hosting. It started as an ad hoc PHP blogging solution with moderated comments, then it experienced a lot of changes, to finally be WordPress-based for a while.

All these changes were quite painful, as with each and every platform change, older-style URLs were still meant to be valid, so accommodating for backwards compatibility was a mess. Eventually, I decided to freeze the blog, then to delete it, as I started a brand-new one on Tumblr — keeping the beranger.org domain. The EL5 repository Odiecolon was still there.

I recovered a limited number of screenshots “from the vault”, and here you can have them (most of the pics are clickable).

Just for the fun, here’s links rendering poorly (ignoring CSS) a page of my old blog in January 2007, while using a GNUstep LiveCD — that was Planète Béranger v1.5 («Open Source and Strong Opinions»):

With the original theme of Planète Béranger v1 («Béranger plays GNOME with SuSE», later changed to more distros as icons), some random shots from 2005:

With a different theme, here’s how posting was looking like:

However, editing an existing post was more painful:

Something from May 2006:

I was changing the headers quite often.

Sometimes, color changes were a bit off:

When creating a post, a “topic” drop-down assigned the post to a “tag” (multiple tags for a same post were possible, but they were assigned later–my “engine” wasn’t that smart):

At some point, I was very mad about the Novell-Microsoft deal. November 2006:

Theme for December 2006 (“U” next to a title meant “updated”; if you click to enlarge, you’ll see a small yellow fish indicating BabelFish translations in several languages):

January 2007, when I liked Pardus Linux:

The love was growing bigger:

In March 2007, I also liked PC-BSD (in the header):

Here’s my blog as seen from a Mandriva Flash (the guy in the pic is Olivier Blin):

Towards May 2007, I was out of inspiration, so I decided to go for a radical (yet uninspired) overhaul — the short-lived Planète Béranger v2 («E(cc)lectic Diary»):

The «3K» Archives were all the previous posts — I guess they were 2,726.

Mega Features? A few «features», such as The Sorry State of the Open Source Today, which I wrote for The Jem Report (Jem Matzan left the project), a couple of «editorials», etc.

Actually, only one of the 7 vertical colored strips was “active” at a given time—depending on the “section” of the blog one was visiting.

When nothing was clicked, the landing page was actually ugly like hell:

What followed was a period when my blog was using a text-based (that’s right, no DB, just PHP and files on the filesystem) blogging solution, now discontinued: “BlogoText”. Unfortunately, there are no screenshots from those times…

As it happens, some other banners were used with the BlogoText engine, such as the following one:

From the (first) WordPress period—Planète Béranger v3 («maybe the last espresso before you die (yes, I am cynical)»)—here’s a screenshot with my blog in WindowMaker under openSUSE (a custom spin built using SUSE Factory):

And here’s a shot with KDE4, April 2009:

Here’s the last version of my Tumblr-based blog on July 24, 2011, hours before its discontinuation. It had 4,268 posts…

The rest is … modern history.