Author: fred

Why make it

This is likely going to be the first post of the site, so, for context: I enjoy making things in various ways and sharing it; be it music, science-related writing and videos, general thoughts, travel photos, and whatever else comes up. Not unlike what drives each of us to post in social media. And I feel like there’s something special about this, something beautiful about living in an era where we can be the social beings we are at a global scale, we can appreciate what others want to share while sharing our own expression. So that’s why I’m making the site, to be a centralised place to put my stuff in the way I want it to be put.
There’s two simple reasons why I don’t want to do it in social media platforms (even though I’ve done so in the past for years):

1. I can shape it however I want. Posts with different modes can live in the same place, while out there I’d need YouTube for video and RSS for podcasts and Instagram for photos and TikTok for shorter videos and Bluesky for short texts and Substack for long texts and the list goes on. I tried all of them. I tried different combinations of them. But it always ends up with me running out of energy because part of the energy is directed not towards the making of what I want to make, but rather towards finding out how to shape my expression into how a certain platform wants me to. Also I don’t know how to make websites so it’ll be a fun adventure of finding out, and in the process, finding out how I want to shape the ways I want to share stuff in the internet.
2. Free as in freedom. I’m enthusiastic about people making things and having the freedom to choose what is done with what they make. This is true for the physical world, where I believe a person or group should be entitled to produce things and get the fruits of what they produce without someone leeching them and taking part of it without having helped (labour exploitation for profit, rents, unjust fees, etc), and it’s also true in the digital context: I’m a fan of open source software, the creative commons, community projects, and overall accessibility of what humans want to share with other humans. So you see why I’d be morally opposed to big tech platforms that have you produce content to encourage others to use their platform more in order to sell them ads and make money off of it. I want to make things for the sake of making things, not for the profit of already rich companies while my fellow humans get stuck in a digital place designed to be difficult to leave. So this will have no ads and no paywalls and nothing of the sort. If I ever feel like there’s monetary value to be created out of something I put here, it will be either at the discretion of whoever sees it to decide, or a direct collaboration with someone I’ve explicitly agreed to give me something in return for whatever activity, and will always be declared.
   Anyway, this is the initial thought that triggered my will to make this site. But I don’t know how to make a site. So the next problem is:

How to make it

Ah, yes. That, in a way, is the convenience sold by big platforms, for which we pay a high price. If one wants to put something out there for people to find, it has to be stored somewhere and there needs to be a public way for people to point their devices towards said somewhere to view said something. The second part is simple, I think, there just needs to be a domain that people can put into their browser and get in here. If you’re reading this I’ve sorted that out. The first part is complex because I’ve never done this and I want to put audio and video and text and have pages be tagged and organised so that people can find them, and that kind of has the feel of a blog but also a social media feed but also none of those, I don’t know.
What I do know is that I’ll use the process of making the site as the first thing I put in the site, showcasing the kind of things I want to use it for: documenting projects, sharing thoughts and learnings, and so on. At first glance, WordPress seems like an interesting way of building the website, since it’s free and open source and widely used. It needs to be paired with some kind of DB which makes sense, that’s where the data will live to be displayed by the site. Now to read about WordPress and getting a domain name and getting this thing started.

Update after launching the site

When I looked into the basics of WordPress I was glad to see you can self-host, which would both (in my naïve view) reduce costs and give me more control over everything. Turns out that it requires so much technical knowledge I don’t have yet and there’s potential vulnerabilities to be opening one’s local network to, and I don’t need that headache at the moment. The choice was then, at least for the time being, to find a hosting provider while I learn stuff. It’s convenient and relatively cheap, and my main focus is to just start putting stuff out there, so that’ll do.

Learning WordPress itself as an editing tool has been fun. I’m far from being proficient but I can make posts such as this one and a first version of a Home page I’m satisfied with, and that’s it. I’ll look into learning each of the more complex things as necessity arises. For now, site is up and I can start populating it with things!