I am back

July 29, 2015
It may sound surprising but maternity leave with a newborn may be somewhat boring at times. And I don't complain at all because only when I'm bored and for a change, my mind is not scattered over 10 different things, I start to feel the desire to learn something new. When Stanko was born, I wanted to record the moments with him, to have something to look back when he'll be all grown up. Having started two blogs before that quickly perished of no activity, I did not want to have to maintain yet another web in addition to flickr, youtube, and my old college website. Perhaps the natural next step would be to get a domain but I doubted if I need it. Since my college account has limited space, and I'm not an admin of it, I did not want to get into deploying an oversized blogging engine like wordpress or drupal.

That was the time when I wrote a generator in python that creates static blog pages from text files. Sure, the editing was cumbersome but it did not need any fancy software or database.

Soon after I returned to work I was laid off and once again jobless. As juggling a demanding child and a demanding job is exhausting, I'd almost appreciate my lay-off if it didn't make me deal with the work visa issues. Shortly before this I bought a 'new' old film camera (Nikon N60) as I was missing the superb colors and contrast of film (film photography started to become fashion in my flickr circles, and it reminded me of that), and had troubles to focus and frame photos with my FED rangefinder (great for landscapes, tough for close ups due to manual focus and the parallax shift). Having a lot of time and a cute object to photograph, I decided to start a photo blog.

This time, I wanted something less awkward than a static page generator but was unsure of using the mainstream blog engines (one reason was that I did not want to deal with php). Michal mentioned Django framework, and having at least slight experience with python, it seemed a like feasible way to go. I could also easily run it on his domain, hosted by a friend.

Thanks for being unemployed for months, this blog did not die quite as fast as the two previous ones. With the new addition to our family (lovely Karin pictured below, with another consequence of my boredom on her head), I once again enjoy the stay-at-home mom status and time to be creative. Hence I decided to revive this blog, not strictly for posting photos. See you soon.

A photo posted by Miroslava Sotakova (@gwhitehawk) on