Website Updates, And Realizing Some Things Are Better Left to Smarter People
I've owned a handful of domains over the years, most of which I've done absolutely nothing with. Some were for school, small personal projects, de-Googling, novelty, pranks, and a couple were literally for spite (I purchased several of the available options for domain to keep them out of the hands of a local racist flower shop).
Most were objectively a waste of money (not the flower shop domains though, that was a perfect investment), but as I've become older and more of a complete fuckin' nerd about basically everything I'm interested in, I've found solid reasons to own a personal domain and actually do something with it. I use one domain for my personal email, (jack@gmail.com is oddly unavailable) and have owned jackscleverna.me ever since I realized that my standard username ends in a standard top-level domain.
This domain has mostly been used for a crappy blog. I've never had much to blog about, so it's mostly been a few crappy essays that were essentially long-form tweets, mixed in with a smattering of tutorial-type content that I'd occasionally send to friends rather than explaining, like this one here about my Media setup that has been edited too many times and is a bit of a jumbled mess.
I've been using Plex and other similar media software for a long time now, and I find that there's this really natural progression and development of knowledge and skills as you continuously work on and manage a media server. You want things to run more smoothly so you learn about Software X, you want more robust storage so you learn about hardware Y and how they both relate to Platform Z and you eventually end up with a surprising level of knowledge that you can then start applying to other non-media services and tools.
That progression got me way into the idea of self-hosting and building a beginner homelab, and I recently bought a Lenovo M900 mini PC to use as a dedicated server in addition to my existing Synology NAS. I want the ability to run more than what my NAS is realistically able to hand, and I wanted more flexibility with how I'm able to run and deploy whatever tool I'm currently learning about. Shortly after I bought the mini PC, I realized that my domain and hosting were coming up for renewal in a few months, which got me thinking about my website and if I could self-host that.
Turns out, yes, I can, but no, I don't want to. I did a lot of research on what sort of CMS platform I'd want to use, how to run it on my server, and how to expose it to the internet. That last one is my issue. I'm a hobbyist when it comes to the homelab thing and have basically zero experience with network security other than some standard basics, and frankly the idea of potentially inviting the internet into my home network just seems like a really fucking awful idea. So that idea got 86'd.
However, the CMS and self-hosting kept my attention. The old website was on WordPress, and I really don't like how dated it feels to use, and managing plugins and updates always felt like a chore. When I was considering self-hosting a website, I was really interested in trying out Ghost. It had solid reviews and the platform seemed simple and ideal for what I was planning on doing.
The hosting part was then the next issue, and I'd mostly resolved to abandoning the idea and sticking it out with WordPress, until in my "how to host a Ghost website" research landed me on a Reddit post that mentioned an online service that runs containerized services (like Ghost) at dirt cheap pricing: PikaPods
Turns out PikaPods is exactly what I wanted. It's cheap, non-local, easily accessible and expandable. For what I want to do with a basic blog, it checks all of my boxes. So this website now exists as an instance of Ghost in a Docker container running on PikaPods, and connected to my domain in Namecheap.
My plan for what I want to do with my basic blog is basically just to document my homelab and technology adventures, as well as to act similarly to my first crappy website and live as a repository for anything else that I feel like sharing. My full homelab currently setup lives on my NAS, but I'm going to slowly start transitioning non-media services over to the Lenovo M900 while documenting as I go.
This is pretty much all for my own use. It's something to write about and motivation to screw around with my setup, but I do otherwise hope that someone eventually finds something here to be useful.
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