I’m trying out a new platform for hosting my writing. Ghost was nice, in that it was simple and easy to write down a post, make it look clean, and had some convenient integrations/embedding tools. What I didn’t like was a lot of the focus on Substack-style newsletter audience building and monetization. Not what I want to be doing here. Modifying themes was kind of a pain too.

I watched a few videos on Bind9 and managed to get a simple local DNS server up and running with some doing. The trickiest part was the syntax for forwarding to PiHole on another port and then setting up the wildcard so for now on any coffeesec.com subdomain goes to my Nginx Web Proxy without having to make a manual entry in PiHole every single time.

I saw a YouTube video recommending SearXNG yesterday and thought I would try it out. It is essentially a proxy that takes your search queries, runs them anonymously through a handful of popular sites like Google. DuckDuckGo, and Brave (or dozens of others depending on preference and what you are looking for), and then does a bunch of wizardry to assemble the results in a relevant list. It was dead easy to set up if you are used to running docker containers, and within about 20 minutes I was up and running with my own search portal.

I think as I get further into this I really am starting to see a purpose in taking ownership of what I put out on the internet. There are so many options to explore and it sparks just a little bit of optimism when I see that I can have photos, music, code, and whatever else on something I control. No one selling my data on the side, or training some new obnoxious LLM with my output.

It didn’t take long before I got the itch to set up something a little more powerful than the Pi 5. I was originally going to upgrade my old gaming PC and use that hardware as a server, but I really wanted something small and out of the way, and there just isn’t much you can do with an ATX motherboard to take up less space. Seems like the best you can do with a midsize tower is a 16"x16" cube, unless you want to shell out for some expensive minimalist cases and wait several months on backorder.

I’ve got fiber now, so I’m trying out a bunch of fun ideas from /r/selfhosted to see what is useful.