Why this site?

June 8, 2025

I built this site with my own two fingers, pecking away hen-like on a keyboard.
It is hosted on an old Dell computer salvaged from a dumpster, which now sits in a corner of my daughter’s bedroom, where I work in the company of stuffed animals and crafts brought home from school.

I built it to see how it is done, to learn by doing, to wrestle, mano a mano, with arcane concepts from my chosen field of IT infrastructure. In IT we borrow words for ordinary things and bend them to describe a whole taxonomy of strange, digital creatures. Like every industry we have our jargon. But oftentimes the objects we describe have no good analog in the physical world. You can only grasp so much by reading. You have to play the game.

The webpages you see here are simple HTML prettied up with a little CSS. I use the static site generator 11ty so that I don't have to re-style each blog post by hand. That way I can feed 11ty my post in raw markdown, run a build command, and it will wrap my post in nice HTML, with consistent styling.

In order to serve this site from my home I had to end-run my ISP which blocks ports 80 and 443 on residential accounts -- whether to make the web a safer place, or to force an upsell to an overpriced business plan, I leave for you to conjecture. The work around was to tunnel my way under the ISP wall, virtually of course, and pipe my content to a service beyond the reach of their pedantic tentacles. The service I use both for the tunnel and the reverse proxy it leads to is Cloudflare.

I had other reasons to build this site. It gives me a place to put my writing, but not too public a place, since I like attention, but not too much attention. I also built this site as a bit of a joke, and for fun, though I may have overestimated that part. On some level, I built this site to give myself a voice, outside of the reach of the social media platforms and their schizophrenic vibe. I am happy with the end result, and I think it strikes a nice balance between simplicity and functionality. More than anything, it has given me a laboratory. A place to experiment, both with technology and ideas.

You can look into the guts of this website here . Maybe you will be inspired to make a site of your own.