March 25, 2019:

About this website

Thank you for visiting my site. This has been my personal website for the past 18 years. It was and still is one of the few active blogs in the Spanish-speaking world, now written in English. At one point, during the peak of the blogging era, it was the most widely read blog in the Hispanic sphere. Later on, it shared its readership with other excellent blogs that emerged between 2001 and 2007. However, during this time, I began to shift my focus from blogging to becoming more of a Twitter-based publisher.

oday, after many years of inactivity on this blog, I have decided to dedicate myself to publishing my writings about history, as well as sharing studies and projects that can benefit the community of developers and designers. Rather than trying to be an “influencer,” I prioritize spending my time learning new things and honing my skills.

How everything started

The earliest record I have of this blog dates back to 1998 when it was hosted on a different domain. At the time, I had no idea that I was considered a blogger, and my personal page was more of a place where I could share updates about my daily life through a webcam and a few lines of text. There were no basic components of a blog, nor was it advertised as such.

In 1999, I started writing articles focused on development, specifically targeting Macromedia Flash and advocating for Web Standards. The site was not yet hosted on its own server and domain. Initially, I faced strong opposition from the development community and designers because everyone loved Flash and my criticism of their way of doing business was not well-received. Despite the aggression I faced, I gained popularity over time, and people began to understand my position on the adoption of web standards and why it was better for everyone. Today, many developers still thank me for my advocacy.

At the end of March 2001, I established this domain as a permanent home for my identity and all my knowledge. In a matter of months, it was the most read blog in spanish, receiving a large number of daily visits that directly measured using unique pages served. At the best moment of the blog, this site served 1.5 million unique pages a day. Even being a blog, programming using absolute strictness in terms of standards, my problem was still the network bandwidth. To my friends who kindly gave me their servers and felt the fire, to this day I am still grateful.

Starting 2007, in my life began professional changes that took me away from the activity of blogging. Soon the commercial blogs took control of everything and new forms of communication were born, propitiated the end of my activity as a blogger. By then, I was already posting periodically on Twitter, which also brought me an incredible number of readers to my blog too but at the end of 2008, my activity on this blog started to diminish more and more.

Now the site is still active, and my personal proposal is to continue writing and publishing all the possible material that I made between 2010 and today. There is a lot of interesting material that I would like to make clear in the blog. I have tried to resume the activity of blogging every year, always with failed attempts. From 2007 to date, I have only dedicated a few articles per year, when the normal thing for a blogger was to write every day, even more than once a day. My expectation for this return is to do it weekly, as many times as necessary, but I won’t like to promise anything to the audience.

Things that weren’t true

One of the things that I wanted to do was to comment on personal topics, rumors of all kinds, and things that happened in the celebrities’ blogosphere. Something that some elite bloggers spoke about but that I had never talked about them. In this section, I will comment on them.

There were some topics about me or this website that was not true. For example, this was the first blog in Argentina. It’s a bold claim, but back then, bloggers spread all around and it was difficult to certify which one of us had the honor. I can certify I was between the 2nd and the 3rd blog in Argentina, and also my colleague and friend Mariano Amartino was one of the pioneers of blogging too –to this day he still keeps blogging!– so, again, it’s a bold call that I always avoided. Some of the blogs I’ve seen with earlier posts than mine were dubious to my eyes. Blogs with no posting activity, to me, were like scams, try and error websites than clear blogging activities performed by people who wanted to be a blog or were active bloggers themselves. Anyways, it’s something I never cared about but people always liked to banter about.

There were rumors also about my behavior with other famous bloggers. Like I hated Eduardo Arcos, Mariano Amartino or others bloggers in general. So far from that, those were and still are great people I never had problems with. But, truth to be told, we had differences in opinions over topics, but never, never went personal.

The other rumor was I was obsessed with visits, activity in my blog. Again, so far from the truth: i never cared about it. It was my friends who told me “wow, i’ve got this much of visits thanks to your link”. I checked stats once and then, but never cared, till the point i removed Google Analytics around the year 2005. I was more obssesed to cover the network bandwith requirements to keep my blog alive. Till this day I don’t care and this blog doesn’t do any type of tracking.

There were people with whom I have fought, even in comments and cross–publications that I will not mention because I no longer want to revive the dead. It should be noted that, re-reading those fights, I realized that they were really cretinous and socially resentful people. People did not tolerate, as often happens in Hispanic countries, that other people do well doing the activity they want. That feeling of envy and attacks on me, led me to rethink the use of comments on my site several times, especially because I did not feel like managing the daily tide of trolls and their encouragement to bother me and those who read or They commented on my site. Over time, I declined comments on my site and these trolls disappeared from the blogosphere and practically, from the internet.

This is not a rumor, it’s a truth: I have quit Facebook, Instagram and most of the social networks because, you know, in this new era of political correctness, not all opinions are welcomed. So, I don’t belong to places where I can be censored. You still can message me on Twitter at @minid, but I don’t post anymore there.

About the design of this website

This website was meant to be readen. It is also inspired in the old famous Jackob’s Nielsen useit.com because I loved that website and everything around it. That’s why you see this kind of design. It is pretty functional even if you think it doesn’t. Data has shown over the years this kind of design trumps over the hyped, overproduced designs I did. You can check, if you want, the entire history of the blog and it’s designs go for it.

Bio

My name is Diego Martín Lafuente (41). I was born on May 20, 1978 in Adrogué, a town in the Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. I am a designer, developer, product manager and serial entrepreneur. Occasionally I invest in companies.