Scope Creep
Some time ago I made the decision to create a blog, a space on the internet I could call my own and blabber on about whatever came to mind. This could be opinions, or technical articles, or hot takes on a theme park, anything that came to mind, anything I enjoyed writing about.
At the time I was an avid follower of the extreme privacy discussion, particularly of the opinions discussed by Michael Bazzell. For a time I withdrew from the internet, trying to avoid adding more to the digital footprint I’d developed over my mere 20 years of existence.
Trying hard to avoid this, but still wanting to express my thoughts on the public internet, I adopted the alias Peritz, and (badly) attempting to remove all ties of it to my real identity, I purchased the domain pardonmynoot.com.
What to do now? According to extreme privacy, I should be self-hosting, using a privacy-friendly tunnelling service such as Cloudflare. I tried, and for a time I built my site using Hugo and served it using an Apache server with a Cloudflare tunnel, but I really disliked writing my content using Markdown. Add into the mix that my old-ass home server was just a 10 year-old run-down desktop running Debian networked to an even older TP-Link powerline adapter and you’ve got a disaster; the tunnel kept dying and I was presented with a Cloudflare error:
A massive PITA. So now I start looking for alternatives. I could go with a hosting site like Wordpress or Medium, but I’m 99% sure I saw some articles a while back about deals with OpenAI or some other such company that would use the content from blogs to train AI. No thanks. Plus they ask a lot of questions and share data with “partners”. I could host it myself in a privacy-friendly cloud, I got a DigitalOcean account easy enough, but now I have to manage a virtual machine and set everything up myself again. Plus, what software do I use and how much do I want to configure? Again I tried wordpress and also Ghost, but I didn’t like that I had to configure so much aesthetics.
I wanted somewhere I could write without distraction, that would be privacy-oriented (or at the very least, privacy respecting), and that would look good out of the box.
Through the Looking Glass
You can see how I spiralled massively. All I wanted was a space to write, and I went down a rabbit hole considering privacy implications, what I could do with the platform in the future, fancy features like comments, and more. The more I thought about it the more my head span. The more my head span the less I wanted to tackle the problem.
Scope creep is a real problem, and it gets worse the busier you are if you can’t keep a lid on it. I’ve just bought a new house that is proving to be much more of a nightmare to renovate that we had first imagined (yes as a first-time buyer you underestimate the effort required to renovate a house, but after talking to parents and beyond, we’ve come to the conclusion that the previous owners did not respect their home whatsoever). Additionally, my manager at work has taken extended sick leave, and whilst I fully support them in their situation, it does also put a little more pressure on me than normal. There’s plenty else going on (I was asked to be a best man to my brother, my big project and the additional heads I needed for my team at work were cut from the latest budget, Christmas is fast approaching, elections elections elections, house = money) which is contributing to the madness up in my head.
I didn’t keep a lid on the scope creep with this project. This was a huge failing and one I’ll be taking forward. Once I put this post up I’ll reflect on the whole process, and realise that I will be much happier for just having chosen a platform. In the future, if I want to continue to pursue a life of extreme privacy, I can export my posts and self-host an instance of WriteFreely if I want.
That’s the main thing from all this. When I’ve had projects in mind and I don’t know 100% what I want (or I do, but I don’t have the resources to pursue the ideal solution) I should be giving myself a solution that provides future options. I’m having to do a lot of this in work; cutting off projects early because I don’t have the resources. If I give myself the space to have options, I can converge later down the line.
So it is in my personal life, so it is with this blog.
write.as, I believe, is a beneficial project to the internet, and it’s one that I support. This post isn’t about them, but I do want to shout it out (since I’m using the platform at the time of writing).
Three steps backwards is still a step forwards if you walk in a circle
I’m back to cloud-hosted blogging. I don’t mind, in fact I’m incredibly relieved. I’ve found a platform that will respect my privacy and provides me with an enjoyable writing experience. I can now noot to my heart’s content.
Don’t ever expect a consistent stream of posts. I’ve given up on the idea that I can be a consistent blogger with meaningful posts, heartfelt opinions, or thorough walkthroughs and analyses. I’ve been writing internal documentation for my company, and I’ve taken personal notes. I’ve now discovered that sometimes I can be quite good at this communication thing and I want to give it a go in a public forum, even if no one is listening.