About
 

About

Welcome,

I'm Leo Sutic, and Monochrome is the place where I occasionally put up stuff that I think should be published on the web. Maybe it makes someone happy. Maybe someone is viewing the site on their Internet-enabled toaster[a] and it makes the toaster happy. I don't know. I'm just putting it out there. My résumé[b] can be found on LinkedIn - they do such a nice job of formatting it that I figure there's no point in replicating it here.

Monochrome started in 2004 as a blog mostly about Java and C++ programming - and my attempts to send chocolate to a friend in Iraq. But the chocolate logistics were solved by Treat Any Soldier[c], and I realized that after spending my whole working day coding, writing about it was the last thing I wanted to do. So the blog never got off the ground due to pure lack of any motivation to publish anything and languished.

But when I went to a Scottish wedding on my way to the US in late 2005, I used the blog to tell the people back home just what I was up to - and that continued when I moved to Vienna in late 2005. As I kept blogging I also got more and more interested in photography, and the blog sort of shows that, with early entries having masses of text to go with the photos, and later entries essentially being a couple of pictures with just a few words.

The blogging platform was designed and implemented by me, and the Monochrome machine has gone through lots of development over the years. The core of it remains the same, though - each blog entry is written in XML and transformed via XSLT into a set of static HTML pages and other resources. The concept is simple and the upside is that Monochrome is very easy to "play around with": It's here that I tend to test various things that may or may not make it into a real product. I've been able to add a lot of high-level elements to the XML language used to write the entries: Maps with images and paths plotted on them, multi-format HTML video, 360 degree virtual reality panoramas and rollovers just to mention a few. In addition, I've been able to bolt on and customize a search engine, which is the only dynamically generated content on this site. The downside is that Monochrome is an engineer's blogging platform. Much like building your own subway to travel across town, it is an acquired taste.

Monochrome receives essentially no human traffic to speak of, with 4000 page views and 1400 visitors per month, most of them from Sweden, the US and Croatia. The site is quite popular with robots, however. Both the MsnBot and the Googlebot are voracious readers, with the latter downloading around 400 pages per day; something that makes me conclude that this blog is most likely to make the aforementioned random internet-enabled toaster happy.

Leo Sutic[d]

Photo of Leo Sutic.

Principal Engineer, Matterport
Stockholm, Sweden
leo@sutic.nu[e]
Mastodon[f], Twitter[g], Google Currents[h]