The Kraxn Blog

art, music, and tech.

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A Kraxn is Viennese slang for an old jalopy, junker, or rattletrap. As a young lad, my grandmother regularly used this word to describe her vehicle. Eventually we developed own our vernacular, and Kraxn became synonymous for any old but useful tool. Amongst those I am close to, I still use this term – so its only fitting that kraxn become the name of this blog.

Likewise, blogs are now crusty old tech that are rapidly replaced by various aspects of social media. These platforms have wrapped their tentacles around our attention. They enslave many to put on their best public face, reverberate inside others echo chambers, or force them into using unwanted/unwarranted technology. A blog, though an older technology, can give users an anonymous voice and control over technology.

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Kraxn.io was a blog I kept from late 2018 to early 2020. This includes my art (for example, Sketch-A-Day), music samples, a little bit of technical writing, as well as thoughts on existence. I originally wanted to keep it anonymous, but know I am fine with this blog being associated to vonnagy.com now. Because I used this for Sketch-A-Day, it also showcases my best blogging effort – blogging consecutively or one year!

For more technical details, I used textpattern for the first iteration of this blog, and luapress for the second iteration before importing everything here into wordpress. There is much to be said about both systems, I am only begrudgingly going back to wordpress now. Textpattern is a very minimal blogging system; it still uses a mysql database, but everything else is  ‘hackable’ in the best sense of the word. It doesn’t have as many plugins as as wordpress, however, you’ll be doing your own tweaks to everything (but this can be fun). Its actively maintained and has a decent community.

On the other end, Luapress is a dynamic website generator. You essential write your blog post in markdown. Its great for writing – but a little more daunting if you want to use media (photo galleries are a bit of a pain).  It is fast, simple, stable, and so long as you are focused on writing, its a great tool. Unfortunately, its no longer being maintained, so though it is stable, you’ll have to hack your way through the source code to get things done your way. I also used luapress on my asylon.org website.

So this will be the final home of Kraxn.io – here are the complete posts from my blog from 20 August 2018 – 03 April, 2020: