Forever Distracted

I find myself constantly looking at blogging options and what crazy things are out there to make life easy. So glossy, so flash, it is easy to get sucked into the hype.

I used to use LiveJournal a lot in the early 00s before the New Internet where we had to be concerned who had the data. I then moved to a WP site hosted in Sweden in the late 10s, and finally, we find ourselves here, on a server running in my own house.

Granted if you’ve read anything on how the backend of this site works, it’s technically held in a data centre of DreamHost, but that’s for recoverability. I could in the next 24 hours unmount the cloud drives and churn the static files on to the web server directly.

I have been tempted to go back to WordPress again, or something else, then I remember what lead me to this need to self host and own my data and it was desperately trying to get my data out of LiveJournal and having tonnes of API issues, the export tool being particularly bad / complicated to pull 21 years worth of posts.

At least with this method I currently have, the backend files are Gemini format (a less bloated version of Markdown), and with the blog text files. The content is pretty portable if I choose to move the data somewhere, and I only need two programmes to regenerate it back to the HTML content you’re looking at (unless of course you’re using the gemini server, then basically there is nothing to do).

One blog option I saw was to use a DropBox drive with Markdown, from a purely face front it is tempting to be able to drag and drop files. However, if I got my ass in gear, I could do that already, if I were to mount my NAS drive to the webserver, cron the site generators, and drop the files locally.

Granted that takes work, but when I originally got OH.MG together it wasn’t just about the content you see, a lot of OH.MG is for me to learn and try new things. As a reader you don’t see a lot of the work I’ve done on OH.MG and the backend games I’m playing. Not just with HTTP/S content, but also with the Gopher, Gemini, BBS, FTP, and email servers.

That’s the fun part. Drag and drop to cloud providers and have some other external service parse that, meh, fun for a couple minutes at best.