The motivation for hosting my own website (kinda like it's the 1990's all over again) came from a realization that I consume a massive amount of feeds but, beyond reading them, I don't create anything new. This became clear a few years ago when I was reading Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. While PARA stands for a way to organize your digital materials (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives), there was another acronym in the book that really resonated with me: CODE (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express). I realized I was doing a great job of the C, some of the O, only a very little of the D and none of the E. That is, yes, I had an extensive set of feeds, books, academic material, online videos, and I used best-in-class tools to bring those to my attention (I'll do a post on the tools I use soon). Sometimes I would spend the time to tag and associate materials but often didn't do this fully. Distill is the act of finding the true essence of the material - really understanding what the content means so you can finally Express - use your creative talents to create something new. That was where I was really breaking down. During the Christmas holidays (2025) I decided to plan some options and finally brought it together over Spring Break 2026.
Hosting Websites in 2026
You don't really need to host your own website in 2026. There are some many options out there to host your thoughts. I decided to use a more modern platform than the old, reliable Wordpress. Ghost is an open-source headless CMS specifically designed for professional publishing, newsletters, and membership-based businesses. I won't be using either of those last two, and the "professional" publishing is questionable ...
With the platform selected, the next question was where to host. I played around with the idea of running my own server at home (I have enough spare hardware 😄) but quickly liked the idea of learning more about virtual machine hosting models. I came across a service called Digital Ocean. They provide all sorts of hosting support and models from simple VMs (called Droplets) to full-on GPU compute and beyond. I went for a modest droplet, installed Ghost, ran all the updates and finally brought this site up on March 31st, 2026. Just before April Fools Day!
Content
As stated above, the main idea here is to have a place to express myself and some of the things I like to work on. Things that didn't feel appropriate for a professional site like LinkedIn, but also, likely not of interest to any of those that follow me on Facebook (my time on that platform continues to wane as I struggle with the advertisement model and the selling of our personal data). The key, as in most decisions, is deciding what not to include and holding a strong line. As I work through some of my other projects like my music, book and photo collections, it would be easy to host some of them here, which would blow through my VM storage in no time. This led me through an interesting thought-process on what sites and applications should host different media - fodder for another post sometime. For now, the focus of this site will be to comment (via the blog) on interesting things that pass by in my feeds, somewhere to capture my projects and finally as a place to link to all the rest of my content across the 'interwebs'.