photo of a robotic arm, source

What the hell is this?

Excellent question! This is mp4k.net, a blog powered by a new static site generating platform named BlogClaw. The software powering this site was built on evenings and weekends in my spare time using Claude to iterate and develop it.

The publishing platform itself uses Markdown and has an Admin interface built using .NET 10. Images are displayed in a nice lightbox using GLightbox.

Markdown conversion is powered by Markdig.

What is "mp4k.net"?

Well, honestly, that's just a domain I registered years ago and has been sitting around unused. I used it as a dummy page for a project I worked on a few years ago before shelving that. Since I still had it, and needed a domain for this site, I reused it.

I probably should have done some searches before publishing this. It also refers to a video recorder by TASCAM and might also have some relevance in the DARK WEB.

Like I said, I might have done a little brand investigation first, but here we are.

Yes, but what is it FOR?

Well, it's a blog. I am going to use it to blog things. Initially, I'll probably blog about developing the software to power this blog. It's called BlogClaw. OpenClaw was a thing at the time, and I thought the whole "Claw" <> "Claude" connection was kind of funny. Then that begat Moltbook and hilarity ensued.

Are you going to release the source code?

That's a good question. I don't know yet. I've done my best to make this application as generic as possible. It's fully themeable, and there are still bugs in the Admin interface I need to address, but ultimately, I would love to release it to the world.

It's relatively easy to setup. Mine's running on a Raspberry Pi 5 in my office. Publishing is handled through Cloudflare Pages and as of right now, it's totally free to host this. All you need is your own domain name and a bit of effort setting everything up.

I have a Runbook for that.

So, yes, all in good time, I would like to publish the source and unleash a thousand BlogClaws upon the world.

Who the hell are you?

Since BlogClaw doesn't have an About page just yet, we'll get to that in a bit. If you're interested, follow me on Bluesky and you can learn more as I post about it.

Thanks for reading!