Hi, I’m Alex. Welcome to my new home on the web!

The IndieWeb

This post will probably be quite a short one, but I wanted something which would serve as an introduction to this new site which I’ve spun up to act as my entrypoint to the IndieWeb.

I’ve been watching the IndieWeb develop for some time now, along with the Fediverse, and I figured it was finally time to get in on the action.

I like the idea of seeing a more distributed, less centralised web develop where people own the content that they create, and control their own space on the web.

Similarly, I’ve been a fan of using RSS feeds to follow stuff I’m interested in for about as long as I’ve been using the internet. I’ve often wondered if we’d have a slightly more decentralised web today if it weren’t for the death of Google Reader all those years ago. Either way, you can enjoy this blog in a nice decentralised way by grabbing the RSS feed here.

Hugo & smol

I’m writing this blog using Hugo, a great open source static site generator. It’s based on the very nice smol theme.

I’d like to say I picked this theme based on the features in the README – such as the lack of JavaScript, lack of any external dependencies, and automatic dark-mode switching. But in truth I was mostly swayed by the simplicty. There’s plenty of very nice looking modular Hugo themes with more functionality, but my web-dev skills are not a strong spot. As soon as I start needing to install yarn and npm and mess with Node.js to make minor tweaks, unfortunately I’m completely lost…

There are a few tweaks I want to make going forward, and I’m hoping that choosing a simple theme means I’ve reduced the steepness of that learning curve.

Future content

My hope for this blog is to post a range of things related to free software, security, and just general homelab-style stuff.

In the past I’ve been preoccupied with ensuring blog posts are as polished as possible before unleashing them on the world. It’s nice to post well-refined content, but that just led to me posting far less and having a folder brimming with draft posts which were never “good enough” to see the light of day.

With that in mind, what I can promise you this time is pure unbridled mediocrity. This means hopefully reasonably frequent short-form posts which will focus on things I learned recently, interesting bugs I’ve hit, random observations, that kind of thing. They might not be as good as fully-polished posts, but it means I’ll actually post them, so there’s that.

I’m a little wary of promising anything too specific in case I don’t have the time to follow through, but I already have a good idea for a bunch of posts next month. I’m planning a series titled ‘No NAT November’ which will chronicle the chaos I cause by completely turning off IPv4 connectivity in my home network for the month, and all the lovely challenges I end up hitting along the way.

Until next time :)