I know what I will sound like sooner than later,
Heck, what have I brought myself into again?
and maybe if I’m an ambitious procrastrinator I’ll maybe say something like this:
I just need to finish this article to start this regular “feature”, but I’ll think its better to wait a week or two…
An early Requiem ⚰️
The problem with this ambitious guy is - it’s not me. If there’s something I’m not good at it’s creative writing. I can bring my thoughts to paper on a technical subject in great detail (ask my colleagues, they hate my longish e-mails).
I may be also some kind of a creator - but I’m not creating write-ups about stuff, I’m creating stuff. I’m a technical guy - I do servers and networks and services. I like the idea, from a technical side of things, to have a blog and from an idealist standpoint I’d like to share my limited knowledge with people who might profit from it.
But: I’m. Just. Not. Good. At. It
While I could write a decent text I could never bring up the energy to post something regular that would attract or make it an interesting read for someone. In todays attention economy it feels like you get a big following or you’re just not “discoverable” (as the twitch kids say these days) because it it so much easier to discover the big players on the big platforms.
I could start a rant (and hey maybe a nice blog article for the future) about platforms, discoverability, small streamers. Suffice to say the idealist in me likes the idea of having my own little blog, on my own domain - where people if they feel like can stop by and have a good time.
But then, why a blog? 🤔
Well, I’m realistic enough to see the reason why this has never worked out for me before. But I’m too idealistic to give up. I just finished a project in a programming language that I have no true idea of and I must say I’m proud enough to share it with the world.
This has inspired the recreation of this blog (it’s still based on hugo) and it’s meant not primarily as a place for me to share knowledge and documentation (I think I might be publishing those in the wiki on my git server) but as a showcase for completed and running projects, deployed services that are free to use for you. So from now on this blog will be featuring mostly ‘things that are an articles or essays’ and projects. Technical documentation and HowTos will probably get their home on the gitea.
Ok so now what to expect? 🕵️♀️
Honestly, don’t expect to much from me here. I’m bad when it comes to promises. My plan for now is to showcase the currently active projects and than maybe add some of the more interesting historic projects to the showcase. I think I’m going to clean up the project a little bit and try to find stuff that was just me not understanding the language 😊.
So if you’re interested at some free services that you can use as you like, or sometimes gameservers for my friends over at munchkins that you’re welcome to join keep checking by.
Now what is the oh-so-secret-project? 🤯
Well ok, there we go. You can already see it showcased on the frontpage - albeit with very little information. The story is easy and old as day, I recommended a piece of software and the vendor wants your e-mail address before you get a download link. I was asked if I could provide a short-lived e-mail alias so that the person didn’t have to dish out their real contact address.
Thinking about this I thought, that yes, I can do that, but it would be way more fun to make some use out of all the unused domains I got and make a little web interface to allow the creation of mail aliases. If this gets too big, of course the platforms will start blocking the e-mail adresses for registration but I never wanted to have a Netflix account on toasted.pianobaguette@aretheystillusingfiveblockchains.xyz
You can find my attempt at a node.js / express.js application on my gitea and you can try out some very cool auto-generated e-mail aliases for yourself on the project site