My thoughts about coming back to writing started with an article I read by Ana Rodrigues. Long ago I was blogging and sharing links on my own domain way before there was Twitter (now X) and Facebook. I ran the server off my home computer that I had built myself. I wrote the HTML on a document that I uploaded with FTP. Back then I experimented with Linux, FreeBSD and different content management systems all the time. I was continually learning and generally doing it by breaking things and fixing them. I had a good time with all of it.
Over the years my work and my little family kind of eroded how I did things. I was busy all the time so I started using Twitter on a flip phone. I remember signing up for Facebook long ago. It was easier than the way I had been doing it, so my blog posting eventually tapered off to nothing. I let my domain name expire and never thought twice about the fact that I didn’t actually own my own data anymore. I had always run a home server, except it became an Ubuntu media server with Plex that I was using to provide movies to my kids. Even that has become something that ended as they now spend the majority of their time on YouTube. I stopped building things and became a passive consumer of content.
After reading about IndieWeb, it seemed like a throwback to the times I worked on all my own stuff. Things have changed a lot… I have a gigabit fibre connection to my apartment, but I’m not going to host my own server. The ease and price of getting a small virtual private server these days makes owning the physical hardware pretty unnecessary. I’m not going to build my own machines because I just prefer my MacBook Air now. I wrote this first post in Markdown on an iPad. These are things I never could have predicted way back when I first started all this, so I’m going to mix the new with the old. My newest server is a virtual home network I have running on Docker. Things have changed a lot because I never would have predicted that. It’s amazing though.
I’m looking forward to picking up my old hobbies again. It probably has a lot to do with nostalgia, divorce and my kids getting older. Probably also has a lot to do with being a “manager” now and not being up to my elbows in technology anymore. I’m going to work through polishing the skills that have gotten rusty over the years and add new ones as I go. So far I have the VPS running, a network of Docker containers and a first post. This is a good start and it’s made me happy so far.