About this Site

Purpose

This blog is intended to serve as:

  1. a public journal of my hobbies.
  2. a writing exercise (I’m a terrible writer)
  3. a learning journey in self-hosting and web-crafting

Content

I intend to share thoughts, opinions, how-tos, reviews and various utterances relating to my general hobbies of:

  • RF signals and Amateur Radio;
  • Self-hosting and web-crafting; and
  • Occasional games and general geekery.

All written content (for better or worse) is created by me. I do occasionally use an LLM to troubleshoot CSS and Hugo short-codes, but never to generate any content itself.

I will generally try to remain on-topic, but I do reserve the “Ramblings” category as a “whatever goes” area. This might contain random thoughts or opinions that fall outside the typical scope of my hobbies; for example, updates on my local weather, my thoughts on a new place I visited, or a rant about the general state of the modern internet. I do try to avoid any politically-charged topics, but sometimes politics decides to force its way into things I interact with; e.g. government-mandated data collection requirements in social media.

Hosting

In reference to Purpose #3 three above:
This site is hosted on a server cluster I built in my home. There is a UPS (battery back-up), but any prolonged power outage, ISP hiccup, or accidentally unplugged cable can and will bring this site offline. I’m also constantly learning and trying to improve and optimize, so I may accidentally break one thing while trying to “fix” another. Despite having built my first website back in the 2000s, I’m still always finding new stuff to try.

All of that said, if you try to visit this site the future and it appears to be gone, please wait a day or two and visit again. Hopefully I’ll have fixed whatever I broke by then.

As for the software, this site is created with Hugo and uses a heavily modified version of the Mainroad theme.

Privacy (and a note on JavaScript)

I’m a fan of internet privacy and a believer in the phrase “be the change you want to see.” To that end, I don’t use any tracking services. My webserver logs give me a rough idea of the traffic I receive, but I’ll realistically have no idea if you visit me once or visit everyday; nor will I know what other sites you like to frequent, what type of products you browse on Amazon, or what posts you’ve recently engaged with on Facebook. That’s not any of my business.

Now, speaking of traffic, the webserver also logs how much data my server sends (requested by visitors) and receives (uploaded by visitors). 90% of all the data being sent from my server is being requested by “web-crawlers”. These are a mix of polite crawlers, like search engines and the Internet Archive, and rude crawlers, like some overly-aggressive content-scraper bots. Because of this, I added Anibus to my site. Anubis blocks a large portion of crawler traffic, while allowing humans and the polite bots past.

Both Anubis and the “load comments” button on certain posts utilize Javascript, however. While the scripts used are open-source, some visitors might still have concerns about potential privacy impacts of running javascript in their browser.

For those who take a more extreme approach to online privacy, I also host this site on both TOR and I2P. Visiting over either of those networks will bypass Anubis and requires absolutely no javascript. There are buttons for both networks in the header of each page.

Alternatively, if you’re a retro-computer enthusiast, you can avoid both TLS/SSL and javascript by visiting my gopherhole. Most of the content on this site is simultaneously published to gopher, so you can follow along without the bothers of HTML.

RSS

On the topic of being the change I want to see, this blog is also published via RSS. This is my personally preferred way of following blogs, forums, and newsletters. To me, it’s very frustrating when I find a page I want to follow, only to discover that they don’t offer and RSS feed. Without RSS, I know I’ll forgot to go back to that site and I’ll miss whatever cool stuff they post in the future.

Other sites

In addition to this blog and the gopherhole mentioned earlier, I also host a more “retro” homepage, and a GoToSocial (Fediverse/ActivityPub) instance.