The Last Steps
I can’t deny that over the last few months I’ve created a handful of websites, many of which don’t even exist anymore, mostly as a form of experimentation. Pablo’s Space, for example, has been my target more than once. It went from something consolidated and old, running on WordPress, to my weird little experiments in the IndieWeb. It became a good blog, but I’m restless, so naturally I blew it up.
The other sites in the same vein followed the same path: they were destroyed and rebuilt, tested, adjusted, and remade. Nothing stayed. Everything was temporary.
And I have to confess, this has been very interesting. I’ll probably keep testing things for a while longer until I find myself in this whole “indie” world. The truth is, I don’t want to talk about myself. I want to create, and to create, maybe I need to understand first.
Personal websites follow a different logic than systems. I don’t keep changing systems, and my systems stay intact. They are things I consider good enough, and I’m not arrogant enough to touch them unless it’s to fix small bugs.
Anyway, the truth is that I don’t think I want to talk about myself. Don’t trust the creature, trust the creator. If you’re reading this post on this blog right now, maybe in a week it won’t even exist anymore.
To talk about the next steps, I first need to talk about what I’ve been up to.
I rented another VPS from Contabo — I really like them, first-class service in my opinion, and the best part is that it’s raw: do it yourself — and turned this small, simple VPS into a Pangolin server, to escape Cloudflare’s claws. But I ran into some problems, as I wrote about in Exposing self-hosted streaming behind CGNAT.
I also took the opportunity to bring my blog, the one you’re reading right now, closer to the IndieWeb without changing its core, only its theme, as I explained in Teaching Ghost to speak IndieWeb.
On that VPS running Pangolin, I placed a few services that are hosted behind CGNAT so they could be exposed to the internet, such as Noctem Café, which is an absolutely experimental pubnix running on OpenBSD — my first time messing with this OS.
I also managed to turn a port-scanning tool, ncat, into a posting tool using the SOLED/2 protocol. You can check out the small and pleasant result at Soledade City.
I could list all the services I’m exposing and hosting, but I don’t know, it doesn’t make much sense right now, and there’s quite a lot of stuff — I’m feeling lazy. Maybe I’ll write a post in the future exclusively about self-hosting and how I manage it all.
I also finally found the courage to stop the specific attacks I was receiving on my servers by moving a good part of my infrastructure into the Tailnet, as I wrote in The night we put Forgejo behind the Tailnet.
Even though the article talks about Forgejo, it was just the first service I pulled away from the surface. After that, I took a whole bunch with it. 😊
Anyway, everything was created, destroyed, and rebuilt several times, in several different ways, so I could learn. And that’s fine. I’ve learned a lot, and the more I know, the more I want to know.
All I know is that it’s hard to reconcile my work time with my experiments. At least sleeping very little is already something I do, hehe, and in the dead of night, the lab comes alive.
When I say the administration is rough, above are some servers I manage and others I help manage, covered up and censored.
That’s it. Let’s go, because there’s more coming.