About Us

SaigonNezumi.com Origins

March 2006, the first blog post was published with WordPress. It was a post about the local Saigon Traffic Police stopping me for not have a valid motorbike license. It was funny: a small fine; I even got change. I remember the traffic police, the vendor who made the change, and I laughed at this.

Today, this scene would never have happened. My motorbike would have been confiscated with a large fine. In two decades, the Saigon I knew changed for the better.

This blog itself changed a lot. In an area of blogging, it was popular. When blogging restrictions arrived, my blog faltered. One potential legal action in early 2010 forced me to move into another direction. It was one that probably killed this blog.

Halal restaurant reviews. Great content, lots of visitors, but a different audience. An audience that opened the doors to another part of the world I never thought I would visit. It also doomed my blog. Being popular in the 2010s meant your content would be scraped, reused, with no attribution.

SaigonNezumi.com died in 2021 during the COVID pandemic, along with the last of the authentic halal restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City. Yes, I just made a political statement.

Rebirth as SaigonNezumi

I had blogged under different names since, mostly with Ghost. First as Matsunaga Odyssey, then as KevinMatsunaga.com. The latter will take you to my current blog, RockyPod. Both focus more on my tech site now, with an emphasis on accessibility.

Yet, it was missing something. I started to fly back to Saigon starting in 2024. I figured that nobody would be interested in blogging anymore. Then something happened; traffic started to return. Yes, some of it could be AI, but many were legitimate visitors. SaigonNezumi was getting noticed again, but there was a problem. I had lost interest in updating my WordPress blog. RockyPod was running on headless Ghost. I used both Claude Code and Codex to experiment with a new blog style. It was fun to write again, then deploy.

PHP2Shell then did something that forced me to do something. I had no choice but to upgrade WordPress so it would not be hacked. I had containerized it, first with Docker, finally with rootless Podman.

It struck me: if I could containerize WordPress, why not try a new blogging platform that was more secure? WordPress was having issues already with the antics of its founder. I asked Google Gemini to research potential replacements. At the top of the list was Wagtail, which was built on top of Django and Python.

Then I let Claude Code do the work. Over 2300 posts were migrated over to Wagtail taking nearly two days. It is still not orchestrating the final changes as I updated this page. I am impressed, and I hope to deploy that day after I post this page.

New Direction

I will update posts from 2024 to the present to this blog when I get time. Photos and other media will be from friends, with their permission, of course. All written content will be mine, with grammar checks using Grammarly. I will try to get it back to what it used to be pre-2010s. Simple and easy.

That was what blogging use to be like.