01 Aug 2024
This website’s come a long way since I registered an account on neocities. For one, it’s no longer on neocities. It’s self-hosted, like an increasing number of little services I’ve crammed onto my old gaming PC, my old laptop and a sad little Raspberry Pi 3.
What was here before, was pulling in posts from Dreamwidth via RSS and rendering them into text here. Now, this whole site is Jekyllfied.
I’m not gonna lie - I’m actually kind of annoyed by Ruby, and bundle has given me a whole bunch of headaches. But I’ve gotten it to a state where at least I can compile the website, and I’ve got exactly what I was looking for - a way to turn a bunch of Markdown files into the blog you’re reading.
WordPress is bigger than what my blog deserves. It requires a database, it can be jammed full of plugins, it would be like killing flies with hammers.
The tradeoff is that Jekyll adds a step between writing the website and putting it on the server, but given how often I update, this is good enough. If I wanted this to be simple and easy, I could just go to WordPress, or install Haven, but few things are simpler than displaying a bunch of posts. And it’s more fun this way.
It is somewhat recently - like a few months ago? - that I actually started cleaning up, setting up and updating things. It all started with Pihole - an excellent DNS adblocker that I wanted to set up in our network.
Nowadays, I have things like:
It’s hardly an enterprise setup, obviously, but I did build a decent chunk of it brick by brick.
Some of this stuff is for work, but most of it is just for fun and convenience, and as a way to be less dependent on proprietary stuff and Big Tech.
Besides, I just want to be the kind of guy who has a website with a blog on it and a bunch of random stuff. Just like the old days. (I promise it’s not just nostalgia…)
I’ve generally been reevaluating my relationship with technology. Even my interest in analog photography kinda ties back to this - I wish technology was built to last and be repaired, I wish it had fewer opinions and listened to you more, I wish it was easier to control.
All the stuff I’ve implemented so far feels more liberating to use than any of the big cloud apps. Plenty of it is modern, well designed and actually not that complex to deploy. (Docker is a godsend…) It requires work, but that’s a process I enjoy.
If you have some skills in HTML, CSS, hosting - anything of the sort, or if you’ve wanted to acquire them - this kind of thing is a good exercise. I’d encourage you to do the same. Let a million websites bloom…
–Wikt