About this blog

Hi, I'm Dartegnian Velarde and this is one of my many blogs. A Meaningful Struggle is my main blog at the moment and I'm the primary author here

I launched this blog on my server in August 2022. This site is built upon the Ghost CMS platform and uses an open-sourced fork of the default Casper theme, which I manually developed.

Dynamic color

You'll notice that, on every post you visit, the color of the site changes. That's because I've implemented Google's "Material You"/M3 color design system into this site. This is a standard feature on my main website and I have worked hard to bring it here so that users of my sites can have a consistent experience.

No comments

Unfortunately, comments aren't enabled for this blog. All of my past blog sites have comment systems integrated into them, yes, but comments for this site will remain disabled. The reasons are: one, I had a prior incident with someone commenting stuff on one blog and, two, I don't really get comments that much anyway. It's not worth the hassle of maintaining them and the overhead it brings for theme development is a net negative.

Small (grammatical) mistakes here and there

English is my first language, despite being a full-fledged Filipino. I use English in my day-to-day work, I compose all of my emails in English, and I even use English when thinking or internally talking to myself.

That said, I'm no grammarian. I don't have Grammarly installed in my head. Even though it's tempting for me to go back and retroactively correct the grammatical mistakes of my old posts, it defeats the purpose of preserving them. I wrote those things at a specific point in time, with my mental state being preserved in them. The best way to show respect to them is to publish my old posts as-is, with no edits or corrections made. By reading my old posts, you are reading them with the same text as when I wrote them years ago.

All of my best posts

Blogging has been a hobby of mine ever since high school. Throughout my life, I have posted on several blog sites—3 of which are notable:

  • My high school blog
  • My college blog
  • My early adulthood blog

I have reposted the most relevant posts from those 3 blog sites here. My goal is to provide one place that can provide a cohesive understanding of who I am as a person.