Deth

Why do I keep this site up? The simple answer to this question is because I can. It doesn’t get any simpler or straightforward than that. It’s a learning tool for me sometimes and other times it’s just an outlet. I also use it to store ideas at times for a later date.

I really have always found personal pages more interesting than the bigger commercial ones. Maybe that’s a product of getting onto the internet in the middle 1990s. They’re their because someone wanted to share something and not for monetization purposes, worded in a way to influence SEO. If only I could smash this last part into those who are going to email me to increase my rankings or sales. I have no sales here and don’t care about rankings. If someone finds it interesting than that’s great. If not then I hope they find something interesting elsewhere.

Why don’t I just use social media to share my ideas? That’s easy too. I control this. I can move it and host it anywhere I want. I have multiple backups so if my host decides they don’t like me and shuts it down today I can easily find a new host and untar the static files or regenerate it from hugo and upload it to a new host faster than the DNS would propagate. Same thing with the fact that any host can shut down at anytime. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram and what ever else is popular now can and will fade eventually. For my setup here as long as I can have a place to host it I can take it anywhere. Hell it’s even platform-agnostic. I do not see any reason why I would stop using FreeBSD but I could run it on any web server that runs on any operating system. Other than the learning curve and few stupid errors I made I switched from NGINX to Caddy recently. Had it not been a spur of the moment decision I could have set up a temporary test VPS to set up up then had only seconds of downtime.

There’s no login required to read anything I have posted here. There’s no walled garden. Hell, there’s nothing to log into through https at all on this domain. I have nothing here that you could register for. In the past it was available when I used WordPress, but that’s long gone and the database with all the data has long since been deleted.

There’s no algorithm to show you the most controversial post to get you to view more adds and spend more time here. If you see something interesting then simply read it or you could email me if you wanted to say something. Everything is available by date in the archives.

Another reason I will always self-host it is there is no censorship. I can take my files anywhere I want to take them this way. Over the years I have probably been through ten to twelve different hosts. I’ve moved relatively easily between them moving from shared hosting to Linux VPS to eventually FreeBSD on various VPS or dedicated servers. I’ve been on FreeBSD for ten plus years now. The server software has gone from Apache to Nginx to Caddy now simply because I wanted to try something new.

If you rely on social media they’re definitely censoring and the whole “fact checking” thing they’re pushing now is something I am really just not that sure about. It’s a slippery slope for them to have an ability to push their agenda.

My ideas and thoughts change over time and that shows if one would look at the topics I’ve posted about in the past. Originally it was a lot of weather related stuff. Don’t get me wrong, weather is still something that deeply interests me. Currently, a majority of my posts are fitness related. Mainly because I am not a fat fuck anymore and have found that I enjoy Crossfit style workouts and have always enjoyed lifting but didn’t have the means to do it until we started Crossfit and then slowly set up our home gym. Really I hope maybe it may inspire other people to take the steps to improve their lives.

Another thing I like to occasionally post is reviews when something strikes me as something worth reviewing. Maybe someone could find it useful if they’d stumble upon it.

A big part of the why I do this it the fact that it’s my place to experiment and try new things out. If it does happen to break it’s not a huge deal as long as I learn something by fixing it.