Welcome to a new place on the internet that I call home. I’ve made long-form content in other places. I’ve tried starting YouTube channels. I’ve posted (what I feel are) well-researched breakdowns on my Reddit profile. Yet I never managed to create a place that was truly mine from the top down. A place where I can put videos, audio, pictures, and my thoughts in the same place. A place that is free from crap. A place where you can read some hopefully neat stuff in the near future and feel like the content matters more than the medium.

How I got here

Earlier this year, Eric Migicovsky launched his blog to announce the return of Pebble. Of course, I quickly fell in love with the idea of a month-long battery life in a competent smartwatch. Aside from that, though, the blog itself was magical to me. How can something consistently look amazing across both mobile and desktop? How would a user interface that barely existed surpass more elaborate blogs I’ve visited? I wasn’t sure, but I think I know now. I’ve spent the last few days working on my own approximation of Eric’s blog theme for Hugo, and I call it FlatMigi. I made a few changes that I thought improved the legibility, glossed over a few things to save time, but largely tried to stay as close as I reasonably could to Eric’s near-perfect UX.

The $1 server

I could’ve just hosted this on GitHub Pages and called it a day, but I decided to use a VPS instead. This usually makes no sense, as GitHub is free and most VPS providers start at $5 per month. Well, I did some digging and found this post that claimed a whole list of providers were offering $1 per month servers. It sounded too good to be true, but I thought plunking $12 down for a year was worth the minor risk. I chose CloudServer.net, which turned out to be a fine choice. I quickly received my SSH info and was able to access the server. I chose Ubuntu when I set the thing up, as I’m more familiar with Debian-based stuff. Anyway, it’s relatively constrained on resources, as you might expect, but the cool thing is I now have a full-on VPS to play around with to bring new functionality to this site when I want. I also have a reasonably respectable 20 GB of storage to play with, while GitHub Pages restricts you to 1 GB. I intended to run OpenHands on this server before I got the idea for a blog. Still, I figured that successfully adapting the version intended for a local network to something secure on the open web would be a fool’s errand.

The focus

This is basically a free-form continuation of my profile posts on Reddit. Every so often, I’ll get the itch to make an in-depth essay on a specific topic. Those types of posts will now live here. In addition, I plan to sporadically post smaller ramblings about projects I’m working on or easygoing pieces about my creative endeavors. If that sounds interesting to you, welcome aboard! As is just about everything I make, this blog is also CC0. If you find content here that you want to critique, reuse, remix, or get rich from, be my guest. I believe in the free sharing of ideas and the products of ideas, and I hope my sharing of ideas brings about something good. If anything, that is the goal of this blog.