About this website

Thank you for visiting.

Minid.net has been my personal website for more than two decades. It started as one of the early personal blogs in the Spanish-speaking web and, at its peak, became one of the most widely read blogs in the Hispanic blogosphere.

Today, the site is still alive, but its purpose has changed.

For years, I moved most of my public writing to social platforms. That worked for a while, until those platforms became noisier, less useful, and less friendly to independent thinking. So I decided to bring my writing back here.

This site is now a place for essays, old articles, personal notes, technical reflections, design ideas, history, and projects that may be useful to developers, designers, and curious people in general more than my "daily blog".

I am not interested in becoming an influencer. I am more interested in learning, writing, building, and leaving useful material behind.

How It Started

The earliest version of this site goes back to 1998, although it lived under a different domain at the time.

Back then, I did not even think of myself as a blogger. The site was more like a personal homepage, with a webcam, short updates about my life, and a few experiments. It did not yet have the structure people later associated with blogs.

Around 1999, I started writing more seriously about web development, Macromedia Flash, and web standards. At the time, Flash dominated the creative web, and criticizing it was not exactly a popular position. A lot of developers and designers loved Flash, and many did not appreciate someone questioning the way they worked.

Over time, more people began to understand why web standards mattered. Many developers still thank me today for defending that position early, when it was not the easy or fashionable thing to do.

At the end of March 2001, I registered this domain as the permanent home for my identity, my writing, and my work.

Within a few months, Minid.net became one of the most read blogs in Spanish. At its highest point, the site served around 1.5 million unique pages a day. Even though it was built with a strict respect for web standards, the real challenge was not the code. It was bandwidth.

To the friends who kindly lent me servers and helped keep the site online during those years: I am still grateful.

The Blogging Years

Starting around 2007, my professional life changed, and I slowly moved away from daily blogging.

At the same time, commercial blogs became more dominant, social platforms grew, and the independent blogosphere began to change. I was already posting regularly on Twitter, and for a while that brought a large number of readers back to the blog. But by the end of 2008, my activity here had declined significantly.

Since then, I have tried several times to return to blogging regularly. Most attempts failed. From 2007 onward, I published only a few articles per year, far from the old rhythm of writing every day, and sometimes more than once a day.

My intention now is simple: to publish again, without pretending this has to become a daily obligation.

There is a lot of material from the past that I want to recover, rewrite, translate, and make available again. Some of it is historical. Some of it is technical. Some of it is personal. Much of it still feels relevant.

I would like to publish weekly when possible, but I do not want to make promises I may not keep.

Things People Got Wrong

There have always been rumors and myths around this website and around me. Some were funny. Some were exaggerated. Some were simply false.

One recurring claim was that Minid.net was the first blog in Argentina.

That is a bold claim, and I have always avoided making it. Back then, blogs appeared in different places at almost the same time, and it was hard to know who was truly first. What I can say is that Minid.net was probably among the second or third wave of Argentine blogs.

My friend Mariano Amartino was also one of the pioneers of blogging in Argentina, and he is still blogging today.

I saw some older sites that people called blogs, but many of them looked inactive or experimental to me. Some felt more like trial-and-error websites than real blogs maintained by people who had decided to publish consistently. In any case, I never cared much about the ranking. Other people cared more than I did.

Another rumor was that I hated Eduardo Arcos, Mariano Amartino, or other well-known bloggers.

That was never true.

We had disagreements. Sometimes strong ones. We argued about technology, the web, business, design, and the direction of online publishing. But those differences were never personal to me. I have always respected people who built things and kept pushing forward.

There was also the idea that I was obsessed with traffic and statistics.

That was also false.

I checked stats occasionally, mostly because friends would tell me things like, “I got this many visits because you linked to me.” But I was never obsessed with numbers. Around 2005, I even removed Google Analytics from the site.

What did concern me was bandwidth. Keeping the site online during heavy traffic was the real problem.

To this day, this website does not use tracking.

There were people I fought with in comments and cross-posts, but I have no interest in reviving those old conflicts. Looking back, many of those fights were pointless. A lot of them came from envy, resentment, and the strange discomfort some people feel when someone else does well at something they also wanted to do.

That atmosphere eventually made comments harder to manage. I did not want to spend my days moderating trolls or protecting readers from people who only wanted to annoy others. Over time, I removed comments from the site, and many of those trolls eventually disappeared from the blogosphere and, in some cases, from the internet itself.

One thing that is not a rumor is that I left Facebook, Instagram, and most social networks.

I do not enjoy places where independent opinions are constantly filtered, punished, or flattened into whatever the platform wants them to become. I prefer publishing on my own site.

You can still find me as @minid, although I do not post there much anymore.

About the Design

This website is meant to be read.

Its design is intentionally simple. That is why Minid.net looks the way it does. It may not look fashionable, but it is functional. And over the years, I have learned that this kind of design often performs better than many of the more polished, overproduced designs I created in the past.

You can explore the history of this blog and its previous designs if you are curious.

Bio

My name is Diego Martín Lafuente.

I was born on May 20, 1978, in Adrogué, a town in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I am a designer, engineer, product leader, and entrepreneur. Over the years, I have worked across technology, product, design, engineering, startups, and digital publishing. I have built products, led teams, written about the web, defended standards, and helped shape digital experiences used by many people.

Occasionally, I also invest in companies.

This website is where I keep part of that history alive.