Other projects

These are some of the things I’ve made that are not software:

• Dreaming of Summer, a weekly newsletter that ran for two seasons: the first one was during the (northern hemisphere) summer of 2024 (during which it was named the Summer 2024 Fanzine) and the second one was during the first quarter of 2025 (in which it got the name Dreaming of Summer). In the spirit of a favorite newsletter of mine (that of Austin Kleon), I shared each week a few of the things I came across on the Internet that I found particularly interesting. It was quite a nice experiment, and keeping it seasonal and with a defined schedule allowed me to be quite consistent without burning out.
  (The only small regret I have is making it one newsletter with two seasons instead of two newsletters, which might have worked better for showcasing purposes. But either way, I loved making it.)

• Friday Songbird, a music blog in Spanish, now inactive, in which I shared a song each Friday (hence the name), with a little writeup about it, about the artist performing it, how did I discovered it and what I liked the best about it. In a way, it was a long-runnning love letter to music. Originally hosted in ctrl-c.club, it was custom made using the Gatsby framework; you can check the technical details in my list of software projects.

• La Biblioteca de Babel, and old blog of mine, written in Spanish. Not the first blog I created, but the oldest surviving one, mainly because previous ones were deployed on platforms that later disappeared or I didn’t take care of creating backups ☹️; this one, on the other hand, was based on vanilla-rb and deployed in Heroku, back when they offered free plans and only supported Ruby (those were good times TuT). That meant keeping a copy of the source code of the project, which included the content as well.
  Not much in the way of content, though, just a handful of posts, mostly about music.

• Capuccino Productions Inc., the name I gave to my different attempts at keeping a blog:

  • The first one was hosted on a Spanish blogging platform that sadly no longer exists. What does exist, to my surprise and delight, is a capture on the Wayback Machine that has preserved not only the content but also the original design, complete with the tacky images made in Paint, the patterned background and the warm palette that goes with the name 😆. The focus was always on interesting things that I found online, but with much more text and opinion, and I think also a little bit of participating in the blogging culture / community of those years.

  • The second attempt was a copy of Wordpress on a hosting service that offered free plans but that, sadly, has also disappeared from the face of the Internet. I didn’t care to keep a backup of it, regrettably, but The Wayback Machine has preserved a copy of it (although with no dessign assets, so it has a very plain and disorganized look). By this version, I leaned a bit more into the “sharing interesting things” aspect, taking inspiration from the tumblelog format that started gaining prominence at the time.

  • Finally, my old Tumblr blog was the last project to carry that moniker, and as the name of the platform implies, this iteration leaned fully into the tumblelog format, turning into a space to share all the interesting things I found online. Which is to say, it’s sort of the precursor to the newsletters and the digital garden.
    (I really should make a backup of it though 😅 backup done! and this little bot is taking care of it)