Just Because You Can...
Yeah, I could self-host this, but is it worth it?
I started this blog back up in the middle of what felt like a real crisis for the internet at large. Content was disappearing and people were beginning to realize that if there is no product, you are the product. The plan was that I would do this big series of posts on owning the full stack. Owning your videos, your writing, your...everything...without the use of any intermediaries that would just be mining your information or could disappear on a whim. Open source the whole way down. Even thought about turning it all the way to 11 and running the whole damn thing on a stack of Raspberry Pis I have sitting in my office.
While this task was manageable, I began to realize that it was somewhat masturbatory.
The people that could undertake running a VPS, building data storage backends with S3 compatibility, and making all the necessary changes to the CMS to connect all of those things already know how to do it. I would spend my days fielding "you did this wrong" and "well why didn't you use this thing" questions.
The people who don't know how to do it, could be easily lost in the mix of all the jargon. This is nothing against them, but it's just a matter of the fact that I've been doing this crap for decades and it's only through explaining it 100 times would I realize that I left out all of the things I forgot you learn after so many years in the industry. I can pull an engine out of a car in a couple of hours (or minutes depending on the car and access to a forklift), but I struggle to explain the process because so much of it is just feel at this point.
All that said, as of today I've just moved to this to ghost.org hosting. I was paying $17 a month for my VPS setup. I'm paying $15 a month to host here with the capacity to scale quickly should I ever need to and no management of upgrades. Calling back to that time I talked about the value of time, I think this makes the most sense.
So, like and subscribe(?) I guess. I don't have to manage a mail provider anymore...so maybe I'll start rolling out a newsletter of some sort. My good friend Matt has Don't Eat the Meeples and I've spent years trying to be more like him.
Maybe today is the day?
