Contact

Well, there is an internet connection in the bamboo forest, sometimes, so I'm able to receive email:

But please, send my encrypted messages. There are a lot of pandas on the same line, and they're crazy about storing all the data they can get for hibernation. (No, they don't really hibernate, but they think they might have to, one day.) I also read unencrypted messages, they make me sad though.

Download the Programming Panda's GPG key

Format of this website

Originally, I intended to write every page by paw — it could have been a code and layout kata to rewrite every page from scratch. However, since all iterations of this exercise would have been published, it could have become a maintainance nightmare for example to fix a repeated semantic error in the markup. Additionally, I do need some automated steps like generating the signature. Consequently, I decided to only describe the articles themselves by paw and combine them with various automatically accumulated (meta)data to form the final document.

The final document is described in HTML5, mainly because HTML is a web standard and reasonably easy to use. The fifth version is not a fixed standard yet, as of this writing. Nevertheless, I'll use it since this new version provides more explicit structuring features than its predecessor. My intent is to use those features to make the code cleaner and the result more readable. For layout and styling purposes, CSS3 is used, for similar reasons.

There is no need for any dynamic content at this point, therefore this website does not use any client- nor server-side scripts.

The code passages included in the articles do not use any syntax highlighting. I might add a static solution in the future, but currently I'm quite comfortable with the clean look of text that is not bold nor in italics, nor using fancy colours (black and white, just like me).

Privacy

I've tried some simple measures to protect both your and my data.

The word wide web is not gratis; someone has to pay for the hardware, infrastructure and electricity. Often, the viewers of a website pay all of these expenses with attention to advertisement, or with their data.

This website is mostly meant for me to shout out, and since it's me shouting, I want to pay myself. This also prevents parties on the server side from having to cover their costs by collecting your data.

Additionally, I'm employing a very basic end-to-end encryption using Transport Layer Security (TLS), more commonly known by the name of its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The additional costs are negligible for me — and probably for you, too. Currently, there is no real reason to protect the information sent between the client and server, since the pages are static, so everyone can see the same content. The encryption serves another purpose: it is my contribution to encrypt a larger share of internet traffic. If the only data protected is valuable, an attack on an encrypted data transfer is always profitable.

The whois-entry of the domain is protected by a whois privacy service; I see no reason to publish my private data there.

Domain

My primary domain is programmingpanda.net. There is an abundance of Top Level Domains nowadays, some of which might fit better to the content I'm hosting here. I rarely visit any websites from the new categorial TLDs, so I'm a bit suspicious about how well they're received. Support for various features might not be provided either on all TLDs, and the registration price is often higher than that of country-specific or the original TLDs. The content I'm hosting is "international", in the sense that it's not country-specific. Additionally, I don't want to impose any association with any country on this website.

Of the original categorial TLDs, I could have chosen .com, .net and .org. I refused to use the .com TLD because of its (original) association with commercial organisations. It is sometimes associated with the USA, too, despite the .us TLD. The .org TLD is not appropriate either as I'm not representing an organisation. What remains is .net.

Costs

With my current selection of service providers, I pay less than $10 per month for the hosting of this website, some git repositories, email accounts and the SSL certificates.