Rewritten website
January 14, 2026
I've been rewriting this site to give it a (hopefully!) more welcoming appearance. There is still some more work to do... for some reason I keep postponing writing the About page. I am also looking into simple blogging setups to better organize this News page. Simple, technically yes, but not as austere as René Coignard's blog... no doubt he is a talented writer, but writing or reading flat .txt files is not my idea of quality time.
The reason I mention René Coignard is because his blogless .txt blog has made me lying awake at night, questioning my own path and sanity. If the mother**.website was a shock and an eye-opener, Coignard's writing was even more so. An easy experiment: open his blog page and right-click to the source page... what you see is 100% identical to the blog! There's no html, no css, no nothing.
For my own website, I'll continue using html, but steering away from complexities as much as possible. I'm convinced however, that good typography is important and that a minimal amount of "make-up-code" makes for a nicer reading experience. But at the same time, I feel we need to liberate ourselves from the current state of the internet. Humanity seems to be in a regression at the moment, communicating not with words but with pictures... and big pictures, preferably moving, are called hero... It has taken us thousands of years to say and understand the word "lion", instead of drawing a lion on the cave wall.
Time to celebrate what makes us unique and truly human!
Espanso snippets removed
January 3, 2026
I removed my Espanso html snippets, as it developed problems I could not explain. I ran out of patience with Espanso...Its .yaml is too complicated and too fragile for my simple purposes.
While I was searching for an easier alternative, I discovered "Yet Another Text Expander", a browser extension for Firefox. Exactly what I needed: a no-nonsense expander for the rest of us. It is professional quality, without anything superfluous. I am testing it thoroughly and sofar it behaves very well.
One thing to remember is that "YATE" is a browser addon, so it works only for documents opened with Firefox. The beauty of Espanso was that it worked everywhere, both online and offline. If you need that, use Espanso with the html utils...
Before I forget, Happy New Year!
Grow slowly, stay small
December 20, 2025
Herman, of Bearblog fame, is one of the guys I love following. His latest post " Grow small, stay small" is a jewel, again. .
Read it here.
Espanso Snippets
December 15, 2025
What happened in the last couple of weeks...
I started this website, but then the webhost developed a bizarre problem, that forced me to move bertvee.org to a new host. I saw the new host had an online editor...Not that I would ever use such an editor. Me, the loyal Geany fanboy! But then, I accidentily opened a file in this online editor. And fell in love.
Despite the fact that it missed some of Geany's powerful tools (above all, no undo button! 🤡), its ease of use and its eye-friendiness, made me say YES!
Then, I realized Geany's snippets only work in Geany... and decided to widen the horizon. Just like Geany, Espanso is free, open-source and cross-platform. It works off- and online, in any app that allows textual or code input.
Espanso is not as simple as the Geany snippets, but after some reading in the excellent docs, even I was able to create very useful snippets.
I decided to create my own html snippets instead of using the (very good) "Html utils" created by Gabriel Barbosa (see espanso hub), as I needed something simpler, easier and more useful for me and my way of writing. But I learned a lot by studying the html utils and shamelessly used some of its great ideas.
As a teaser, here's one of my espanso snippets:
Type " :! " (without quotes)
to get:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title></title>
<meta name="author" content="">
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link href="css/style.css" rel="stylesheet">
<style>
</style>
</head>
<body>
<!--<script src="js/script.js"></script>-->
</body>
</html>
***
Bye!
First post... well, second 😄
December 14, 2025
Very few people know Marklown
Is going to be the new kid in town
Among them some front-end poets
But none of them are ready to show it.
Phasellus laoreet...
December 13, 2025
Phasellus laoreet lorem vel dolor tempus vehicula. Idque Caesaris facere voluntate liceret: sese habere. Ab illo tempore, ab est sed immemorabili. Mercedem aut nummos unde unde extricat, amaras. Praeterea iter est quasdam res quas ex communi.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Donec sed odio operae, eu vulputate felis rhoncus. Salutantibus vitae elit libero, a pharetra augue. Nihil hic munitissimus habendi senatus locus, nihil horum? A communi observantia non est recedendum.