What is This?

What is the purpose of this website? The combination of the URL & blog name, the sidebar description and this nobody writer all reveal nothing about what this place is. I think the best way to summarize really what this site is: this website is a personal blog which can vary from some common topics that I think about like politics and video games (development sometimes!) to macroeconomics and marriage all in the pursuit of “developing” better writing. I don’t really know what I am going to talk about on each given post.

Why am I running this blog? This is not my first blog. I’ve had several over the many years from when I started a blog as a wee lad (age 12 on Xanga, does anyone else remember that?). I moved on quickly to Wordpress before it became the major CMS running 39.5% of the internet in 2021 when I was 15 with my own domain name and web hosting. I started a blog I wanted to call crossover with my best friend at the time and we would show the crossovers of our lives and talk about it. (Turns out despite being best friends, we did not have a lot of life crossover and thus had little to write about.) After my blogs died, I went on a website/webhosting hiatus leaving an ominous splash page up for 10 years. So here I am running this blog. Oh wait, I didn’t answer the question. Because I can. As an adult, you can do whatever you well please (generally at least within the confines of the law) because you no longer have to impress anyone.

One other reason I am running this blog is that I am interested in learning new things. Currently, this blog is running on the Ghost platform. This instance of Ghost is actually containerized on docker running with evertramos’ nginx-proxy-automation as a proxy. These containers are then run on a single droplet on DigitalOcean. While this took me a lot longer than simply creating an account on Wordpress, Medium, or Substack (like I would get any paid subscribers hah), I wanted to learn something new (I’ve never used docker, nginx, Ghost, or DigitalOcean) and I wanted full control. I don’t even know if I will use that power, but I like having it. This truly is my domain (pun intended) and I will wield (almost) absolute power.

For a few weeks before this Ghost blog launched, I was actually running a working container using DigitalOcean’s fabulous Wordpress tutorial. After installing, I just did not like how complex Wordpress has become. I also did not like the default themes. I am much older now than when I started on WP at 15 and I have come to value my time more. The “top” (yes, yes, not a good way to find themes, but this does give some merit to those themes by filter of the masses) themes just were not any good from my perspective. I have been way too spoiled by generally unified UI/UX design from Google and Apple. I wanted to enjoy looking at my blog. I wanted simplicity. Ghost’s default themes happened to fit that bill as I was looking for WP alternatives.

Enough about technology, I have one last point I want to touch on especially before my political posts. In short: be civil. I am not a close-minded person (or I like to think so). I’m open to ideas as long as they have good rationale behind them. Using dubious sources (low factual reporting and/or hyper-partisanship either direction according to this chart) or logical fallacies is not going to convince me to accept or change my view. That said, politically I am a registered Democratic Socialist and I read the New York Times, but I believe in balancing that with fiscal conservatism and balanced spending and read the Wall Street Journal. I love America and would not live anywhere else. Ok, the exception would probably be Finland while I have newborn children because men get 164 days family leave. Other than that ‘Murica.