esgeroth : about
info

About

Overview

This is the personal website of Peter W Rijks, a.k.a. Pete. It traces its origins back to 1995ish, and the esgeroth.org domain was registered in June of 1999.

I am a husband and father. I program for a living. When I have time, I enjoy hobby electronics and coding projects, reading, and getting outdoors.

Why esgeroth? I thought it sounded cool. You can read more here.

This website has always been, currently is, and probably always will be under construction.

Structure

  • Pete's Log
    Pete's Log is my online journal that's been going since December of 1998. There are some gaps, but it's still going, more than half my life at this point.
  • KLUE4
    A user-contributed customizable random sentence generator.
  • Stuff
    Everything that doesn't fit into any of the other categories is dumped here.
  • History
    An archive of old versions of my webpage going back to 1995. Somewhat embarrassing to me in parts, but I miss the old web and want to do my part to preserve it. There is a significant overlap in the type of content you'll find in history and the content you'll find in stuff. With some of my older content it's a bit arbitrary if it got put under history or under stuff. Basically if I wanted my "this is historical" disclaimer on it, then it went under history.
  • Hardware
    I've started dabbling in hardware stuff. So far I've put one PCB design here to share.
  • Software
    Software I've written and am making available online. Some recent stuff, lots of old stuff.
  • Random
    This link will redirect you to a random page on this site, selected from a curated list of links.

Colors

The design of this website is inspired by the color #41FF00. Read more about the color scheme here

Fonts

This website uses Roboto and Roboto Slab for headers/navigation, and Lora for content text. Roboto and Roboto Slab are licensed under the Apache license and Lora is licensed under the Open Font License. Code is presented in the default monospace font of your web browser.

Accessibility

It matters to me that this website be accessible to you and anyone else who visits it. However, it being a personal project and accessibility not being an area of expertise for me, I am bound to make mistakes. Please be patient with me. I do try to run it through online accessibility testers from time to time, but that can only help so much.

If you encounter any accessibility barriers while using this site, please contact me and let me know: prijks@esgeroth.org

One caveat is that page designs under the history section have good odds of being poorly designed and one aspect of it being a history section is I want to leave them as unchanged as possible. Advice on how to best handle that is welcome.

That mohawk picture

The picture of me that stalks you throughout most of this website is from a halloween party in the early 2010s (I think 2012, but I'm not sure). The mohawk is real. The piercings are not.

When I moved to Chicago in 2013, I created an OKCupid profile on a whim. I made that mohawk picture my profile picture. It caught the eye of my now-wife. Her first message to me was "Love the 'hawk!"

So obviously I'm a big fan of that mohawk pic.

a few more pics of me

Technical Details

This website is pretty simple as far as websites go. The backend is PHP, although much of the content is actually pretty static. There is some JavaScript, but I'm trying to do this thing where pages work just fine without JavaScript. Crazy, I know. There are a few rare exceptions, but only when the point of the page is JavaScript (e.g. colorama).

For the most part, this webpage does not use any frameworks or libraries beyond what comes with PHP by default. I use enough of those in my day job. It feels sort of liberating to write plain PHP and plain JavaScript. In a few places I have made use of libraries or integrated code written by others, these are listed below:

  • indieauth-client-php
    MIT licensed — Copyright Aaron Parecki and contributors
    Used for signing in with IndieAuth
  • Theme toggle adapted from dark-mode-demo
    MIT licensed — Copyright Ryan Feigenbaum
  • fig-standards
    MIT licensed — Copyright PHP Framework Interop Group
    Class autoloading code adapted from here (PSR-4 to be precise)

I test this website with the following browsers:

  • Frequently:
    • Firefox on Debian
    • Safari on iOS
  • Occasionally
    • Firefox on Debian with JavaScript disabled
    • Lynx
  • Rarely
    • Chrome on Windows