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Knight in Battle


The Joys and Sorrows of Maintaining a Personal Website


My website has been my preoccupation for the past three years. It fills most of my free time. It provides opportunities to do good in the world that I do not feel I have as an engineer. It also adds challenges and frustration. At times, it magnifies my feelings of self-confidence. At other times, it magnifies my feelings of self-doubt. It adds meaning to my life.

Running a personal website is an emotional roller coaster. This fact seems strange to me because I feel I do a fairly good job of keeping my ego disengaged from the process. I realize that whether people like what I write or hate it has absolutely nothing to do with my worth as a human being. Yet, receiving comments and emails from readers who say they enjoy my website and understand its value feels good.

Sometimes I wonder what possesses me to spend so much time reaching out to people who I will never meet in person. I realize that trying to change the world is futile, and that nothing I do will make the slightest difference in the grand scheme of things. So why do I bother? What is it about me that causes me to engage in this Quixotic adventure?

Most personal websites draw little traffic. Many blogs appear as if on a whim. A few articles are posted on them. Then, they languish, their owners having decided the effort required was not worth the handful of visitors they received per month. This is the kind of traffic that new blogs by beginning bloggers can usually expect. The average established personal blog currently receives something like 2000 to 3000 unique visitors a month. This is for a blog that has been around for a number of years and puts out fairly regular content.

Those who decide to become serious about blogging soon learn how hard it can be. Sometimes, the effort of researching, writing, coding, struggling with difficult software, and fending off web-crawling robots reminds me of trying to pull a small tree out of the ground with my bare hands. I strain with all my might until my arms feel like they will be pulled out of their sockets. Resting from my labor often means searching for websites and articles by others that are informative, interesting, thought-provoking, or inspiring. As I read and think, ideas emerge somehow, and my enthusiasm for particular topics grows.

When an individual creates a personal website, he is bucking the entire system of the commercial web that fights ferociously to keep personal websites buried where no one will ever see them. Running a personal website in this environment is like going up against a cannon with a thumbtack. It is like a knight going into battle armed with only a sword and shield, while the enemy has machine guns. Holding his shield in front of his battle-weary body, his chain-mail-clad feet make sucking sounds as he advances slowly through mire mixed with the blood of the knights who have fought before him. He moves cautiously, haltingly forward through a hail of bullets.

The enemy possesses every advantage. Personal website owners are nearly always just ordinary individuals. They often have glacially slow upload bandwidths, especially when self-hosting from home, and zero training in website design. The enemy has seemingly unlimited funds, massive resources, acres of server farms, and teams of writers, engineers, marketers, and psychologists. The enemy has such resources that few individuals who run their own websites can even fathom what they are up against.

As someone running a personal website, you are like the neighborhood cobbler competing against the national chain stores. You know your product is superior, but you still have no hope of prevailing. Your best possible outcome is merely surviving to continue the struggle.

If your website is a blog, despite overwhelming odds, after perhaps a year or two of writing, you may post an article that is noticed. It is not noticed the way the latest Tom Cruise movie or the British royal family are, but it receives tens of thousands of page views, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand. You are surprised, even shocked. You ask yourself what you did differently this time than the first fifty or one hundred. The answer is probably not much. Success on the Internet is largely random and fleeting. Still, this one success feels really good. It feels like you are finally managing to pull the tree out of the ground.

Over the next year, you may receive a handful of similar successes. If you have code running on your blog that allows visitors to make comments, you may begin to recognize a few names appearing more than once. Maybe readers post a dozen comments in a month. This buoys your spirit.

While all this is occurring, you are still tenaciously gripping your shield with both hands, arms straining, as bullets are furiously bouncing off. The enemy does not want you advancing any closer. Still, for some reason, you fight on.

The bullets of the Internet are everything corporations do to keep personal websites from attracting attention. They are thousands of articles telling Internet users that everywhere outside corporate walled gardens is unsafe. They are search engines providing only tiny numbers of search results for personal websites, even when their owners write articles the way the search engine companies want, design their websites the way the search engine companies want, and refrain from posting links to other websites the search engine companies don't like. The bullets are social media sites defining articles on personal websites as blog spam and blocking accounts of website owners who try to post links. They are armies of web-crawling robots stealing bandwidth from personal web servers, making them harder for actual humans to reach during high-traffic periods. If the robots are not blocked, they can grow to nearly all of the traffic on a personal server.

Many a brave knight, broken and exhausted, has fled the Internet battlefield. I have received emails and comments from some who hosted their own websites in the early days of the Internet, perhaps as late as the mid 2000's, until they finally could no longer endure the robots and the rudeness of some of their visitors. They stopped feeling the results were worth the effort. They left the battlefield disgusted by what the Internet has become. They abandoned the cause. The enemy prevailed.

From time to time, I consider shielding my website with Cloudflare's services. I resist the temptation because I strongly suspect that, despite Cloudflare's current good intentions, in the long-run, this is playing into the hands of the corporate-controlled web. Relying on commercial web services limits the freedom we have as personal website owners. Once they have us relying on them, we are forced to play by their rules, and at that point the battle is over. We may not have realized it yet, but we have been captured. Unless we manage to free ourselves, in a short time, we will be working for the enemy. Soon, we will have their advertisements on our websites. Soon, we will be rewriting our articles and modifying our websites to attract more traffic from their search engines. Soon, we will be throwing out our best content because it is too controversial for their teams of often ethically-challenged marketers. Soon, we will no longer be knights. We will be their lowly serfs clad in filthy rages begging for scraps. They will own us.

The reality of the situation could be depressing to me personally if not for the fact that the Internet is not the whole of my life. I still have friends and family members. I still have work. I still have to shower regularly. I still have to keep dental appointments. Real life goes on as I fight figuratively for my life on the Internet and literally for my freedom to speak there. I remind myself that creating and maintaining this website and blogging are just activities that take up huge chunks of my time. They are a part of my life, not my entire life.

One of the sorrows of owning a personal blog involves the anxiety associated with writing. This may be the worst part of blogging. Writing is often packed to the brim with angst. While machine gun fire ricochets off my shield, I deal with my own internal mental battle. I wonder how in the world I can continue coming up with new words to put on a page. Occasionally, I wonder why I should continue trying.

After I had written my first 30 articles, I thought I had said everything I wanted to say. That was three years ago, and yet, somehow I have continued putting out fairly regular content. This amazes me because I do not know how I am doing it. Ideas just come, and many of them are actually good, meaning they have value to readers. Though most of my best writing does not attract exceptionally large numbers of readers, at times when I have been very lucky, a few of my articles have brought tens of thousands each to my website.

Will the good ideas end? I have no clue. Sometimes, I have so many that I have a writing backlog. That also causes me anxiety because I worry that I may not begin working on them for weeks or months. I worry that my unborn visions will somehow evaporate before they can be birthed. I am eager to write them, but I must first deliver my current work.

Over the last three years, I have learned two valuable lessons about writing for my blog. The first is to keep a list of ideas for articles. The reason for this is that sometimes ideas come as if from a fire hose, and at other times I feel like I am dying of thirst in the driest desert on earth. Having a list of ideas evens things out. When I am in the desert, I have a canteen of ideas from which to drink. This is how I survive to put out fairly regular content.

The second lesson I have learned is that when I first sit down to write I must allow the flood of ideas to flow out of me onto the page without worrying about what is coming out. If I pause to correct grammar, spelling, or sentence structure, I risk losing sight of the vision that created the words in the first place. The emotions that produce the words threaten to go away, and writing can become more like solving a math problem than revealing the contents of my mind and sometimes my soul to the world. The meaning is lost, replaced by the mechanics. I remember reading one writer's admonition to always write while angry. Anger sometimes produces great writing--great, because it means something.

Having occasional attention drawn to my website because others think I have written something of value can be a huge distraction from what I am trying to accomplish. Analyzing hundreds of comments on Hacker News about one of my articles can take up hours that could otherwise be devoted to researching and writing. The stress of the added work of sifting through comments on other sites and fending off the robots that follow the larger numbers of visitors to my site is often enough to cause me to intentionally write articles that will appeal to a narrower audience, simply because I need to rest. Yet, I know that attention is good because it spreads my message and encourages me to have a more positive attitude about my efforts.

The good news is that while the battle is raging in my head and on my website, my writing is slowly improving. I know because I often flinch when I read what I wrote two or three years ago. Sometimes I want to go back and rewrite it all. Usually, I only let myself correct a few typographical errors, poorly worded sentences, or grammar and spelling mistakes.

Rewriting articles somehow seems wrong. It feels dishonest. My writing will never be perfect, and trying to present it as a perfect finished product would be a futile lie. No article will ever be flawless, no matter how many times I go back over the years and rewrite it, like an obsessive-compulsive school teacher unsatisfied with his blackboard handwriting. After a while, he stands back and blinks in astonishment, realizing that he has been doing nothing but erase and rewrite the same few words on the blackboard. Meanwhile, the class has ended. The students have left without learning anything.

One of the things that makes me happiest about running a self-hosted blog is that I can write whatever I want, and anyone can read it--assuming they can find it. I have no critic that I must please except the one in head. My only editor is the one in my own mind asking if I am satisfied with what I have written. I answer, "No, and I never will be." My only publisher is the one in the mirror asking me how long I think I can keep this up. My answer is always the same, "I don't know. I'm surprised I've managed to do it this long."

Although I do submit links to my articles on social media, I have learned not to tailor what I write for them. They are either interested in what I have to say, or they are not. Most often, they are not. Most often, my words are overlooked. I write, publish my words on my website, and make an effort to put links to them on the various Internet forums that have not yet banned me. And whatever happens, happens. Whether readers love what I have written or hate it, my words are out there. If I can disengage enough from what readers say about them, I can focus on writing what I want to write and what I think readers can benefit from reading.

Usually, one of my articles rises briefly above the noise on the Internet only because a kind reader posts a link on the right social media platform. That is how most new readers discover my website. When this occurs, large numbers come. Their attention peaks for a day or two and then gradually fades over the next few days until the usual traffic pattern has resumed. Perhaps a very few become regular readers, but keeping track of websites and checking occasionally for new content is hard for most. Those who use RSS feed readers are more successful, but most do not. Most let "The Algorithm" choose what they read.

Many who use RSS feed readers do not use them correctly. For this reason, I am forced to block them from accessing my website to preserve its tiny bandwidth for those who are actually reading articles. Some users are not aware that by downloading RSS feeds literally every two minutes, they are hogging Internet bandwidth and wasting resources. Just because this practice costs them nothing does not mean it costs nothing. By some estimates, 10% of the electricity produced on the planet is used to power the Internet, and a very large percentage of that is wasted. Blocking those who are knowingly or unknowingly wasting Internet resources saddens me, but I block them anyway.

My greatest joy in running my website comes from producing something of value to other people. My site is my gift to the world. It is not something I am paid to make simply to enrich some company's shareholders. My creation benefits others in a way and to a degree that I believe I could accomplish through no other means.

Perhaps one method of continuing to produce worthwhile content and of staying in the battle to make our personal websites visible to those who may benefit from them is not seeing the effort primarily as a battle. Personal website owners who endure may do so because they learn to view their work as a way of providing a needed service or information. Perhaps we should focus less on the number of visitors we draw to our websites and more on our efforts to create something of value, something that will make others just a little wiser, just a little freer, or just a little happier. Maybe we should focus on the fact that we are telling the truth while the enemy is simply trying to sell a product, often a flawed product designed to break as soon as the next flawed product is ready to be shipped, a product no one would want if they truly understood what they were purchasing. The enemy's product may be material, like a laptop computer, or immaterial, like a flawed political ideology. Perhaps some of us should focus on building the online communities that we feel lead to positive social interaction. Perhaps others should attempt to do nothing more than make people smile because they see that as having value in a world that seems otherwise dreary and depressing.

I suspect those whose websites endure the longest are those who find joy in coding, writing, and communicating with their readers. When we love what we do, it stops being work and starts being play. As play, it rejuvenates instead of depleting. As play, it becomes an end in itself, something to which we look forward, rather than just a series of tasks to be completed.

An unexpected joy that I have discovered by maintaining a website is that it occasionally draws kindred spirits. I rarely meet anyone in person with whom I have strong common interests. Most are too busy surviving life to think about much else. They simply do what they are told without asking for justification. These are not the people I desire to know. These are the boring drones of the world--and the world is filled with boring drones--people who rarely openly question anything. I want to know those who have interests other than football and beer, passionate intellectual interests that enliven them and make their lives colorful, meaningful, and worthwhile. I don't care if most people see them as quirky or strange. What matters is that they have chosen not to think only the thoughts they have been told to think and utter only the words they have been told to speak. They have reasons for their words and actions that are their own.

I find comfort in the fact that online friendships do not end when friends or I relocate for jobs, education, or other reasons. In the physical world, being forced to relocate repeatedly for work has caused me to give up many friends and acquaintances. Having a friend who has a website means I always know where to find him. No matter where we are in the physical world, I always know as much as he chooses to reveal about what he is facing in his life and what he thinks about it. We can never be forced by geography to end our online friendship as long as we maintain our websites and common interests.

Despite the minor distraction, I enjoy receiving emails about my articles and reading readers' comments about them on my website. This is how I learn about readers' efforts to deal with the issues I am struggling with and writing about. This is how I am reminded that I am not the only one frustrated with the vagaries of modern life and its technology who feels things should be different. I am not the only one who knows things could be different if more people cared.

Knowing that I am not alone is a source of motivation for continued writing, not in the belief that by doing so I will change the world, but simply because I am encouraged to feel that someone should be writing about our shared concerns, someone who is not receiving a paycheck or a campaign contribution for doing so. And who better than I? Or you?

If you have found this article worthwhile, please share it on your favorite social media. You will find sharing links at the top of the page.





Related Articles:

Seven Reasons for having a Personal Website

The Old Internet Shows Signs of Quietly Coming Back

How to have Your Own Website for $2 a Year

Running a Small Website without Commercial Software or Hosting Services: Lessons Learned

Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website

Comments


nick
said on Mar 06th 2022 @ 06:59:09am,


When I started my own personal website project blog thing (you can see it still remains an amorphous idea), I had a massive internal debate about whether or not to pay for some minimal web hosting, or try to learn to do it myself using some of your instructions.

In the end, I ended up paying for hosting, since it was so incredibly cheap for what I wanted to do. I weighed that against the things you mentioned, having to set up my own defenses against bot spam, etc, and at the moment, it makes sense as the best option for me. That is not to say in the future I won't take up my own dented shield and start hosting my site on my own hardware in the future. In fact, the idea does sound appealing simply because, well, I will learn something by doing it.

I started RTFM.LOL because I realized I deeply miss how the Internet used to be, and have been watching folks like yourself fight to keep that memory going, hanging out on personal recreations of Old Web territories and aligning myself with command line communities. I wanted to contribute *something* even it was just a personal exercise that nobody else might ever see. It is important for me to let this thing develop organically, because if I try to control it too much, I will end up trapped in a realm where all my efforts are poured into satisfying expectations instead of having some fun and learning.

As you mentioned, it's a lot of work...and that work often falls to the wayside. I started off wanting to commit to a post a month, but I'm having trouble even maintaining that because of the free time it takes to either research, or do a project to write about. It's a deceptively huge undertaking for an individual in our busy world of to-do lists and notifications, but let it be known that your work does not go unappreciated. A new CheapSkate article is something to be looked forward to, no matter how long it takes, because you can't find this kind of honest content, this humanized content, on the corporate Web.

So, thank you!



Cheapskate
said on Mar 06th 2022 @ 07:56:21am,


Nick, thank you for your kind words. I'm glad to hear that you are still motivated to maintain your website. Thank you for your contribution to keeping the "old Internet" alive. I completely understand your decision to go with paid hosting. Hopefully, if you decide that running a website is something you want to do over the long term, you will eventually shift over to self hosting. The best easy solution I have found so far for self-hosting from home is Yunohost. It will let you put up a basic website. Let me know if I can be of any help in getting your comments working. Sorry I was not of much help before.



Andy
said on Mar 06th 2022 @ 04:34:09pm,


Maintaining a personal website that allows curated comments and
occasional contributions is like running a pub house or small local
shop. You are a pillar of a community, which changes the world in a
small, positive way.

Increasingly, this is almost _all_ I care about on the internet, as
the commercial parts become impossibly toxic. I long for webrings and
links pages to other similar sites. Don't pander to those awful search
engines.

I think it's natural and good that you occasionally write a
meta-article on the trials and joy of being the pub landlord. And it's
normal to seek a little validation and support in times when your
energy gets low due to the slings and arrows, and jeers of abuse from
those who feel threatened by independent speech and forums. One of
the most important things you do here is encourage others toward
similar projects.



Andy
said on Mar 06th 2022 @ 04:43:55pm,


Nick I just want to say that when I visit https://rtfm.lol all I ever see is

"Protected by Imunify360" and a CAPTCHA or some other means to reject
me.

I note that Cheapskate steadfastly refuses to block marginal users,
those who come from gateways, VPNs, foreign IPs or Tor, and may I
politely encourage you drop whatever it is that is "protecting" your
website (but actually turning away the very sort of people who would
most like to read it)

sincerely,
Andy



colin@mooooo.ooo
said on Mar 06th 2022 @ 04:58:27pm,


> those whose websites endure the longest are those who find joy in coding, writing, and communicating with their readers. When we love what we do it stops being work and starts being play. As play, it rejuvenates instead of depleting. As play, it becomes an end in itself, something to which we look forward, rather than just a series of tasks to be completed.

you touched on a lot, but this is the strongest for me. i started my blog in college. like the people you care about connecting with, i get joy from learning. at the same time, i abhor dishonesty. by writing down the things i learned and making them public, i forced my learnings to become as bullet-proof as possible.

additional reasons for blogging was always to grow myself professionally. to cultivate a portfolio and to develop communication skills that are critical to landing a job. once i actually did land a job, my blog died (it’s still hosted, but hasn’t received new content in years). part of this is that my tech stack was a ridiculous experiment that became painful to deal with — but the bigger reason it died is because i wasn’t *really* doing this for myself. i was doing this so that i could justify my value to corporations that might let me work for them. you hint about being an independent person on the net, less beholden to demands and the rules of others: i thought i was, but i wasn’t.

i’ve had a couple months unemployed now. i tried to build my own programmable logic device from commodity components that one could feasibly manufacture themselves. i did this as a kid with relays (i.e. a relay computer), and this time i thought i could do it with a solid state device (magnetic core memory, with its lesser-known component, magnetic logic). i failed.

now my days are filled with reading: mostly philosophy, in the incredibly broad sense of the word. i have one friend who is seriously into this stuff, but i don’t get enough quality time with him to really dig deep. i’m reminded of my penpal days, and the days where i would read/write thought-out essays that let us understand each other in a way that’s just become foreign to me in this decade.

there’s a strong lowercase-libertarian current under all of this for me: facilitating the needs and fulfillments of the individual, while acknowledging that the social component is literally an entire layer in Maslow’s hierarchy. i’m going to re-embrace the personal website as a tool for this. i’ve set up the infrastructure to self-host this time, whipped up a Pleroma instance (like Mastodon, “the fediverse”), and over this week i’ll migrate that to a new domain name, sort out email, and incrementally build a proper blog where the focus is simply to expose my intimate self to all those who would appreciate a connection (and this time with RSS, hah!). it’s daunting, and like you say oh so time consuming. but i have the time, and with this mindset it’s properly *exciting*.

hello from a kindred spirit. appreciate what you’re doing.



Lynne
said on Mar 06th 2022 @ 09:30:16pm,


Thanks again, Cheapskate, for a great article. I don't remember when I found your site, but I was originally here for your posts about how to research, repair, and update old laptops (which is what I was doing at the time). I used a great deal of your information, and (as I've learned to do since, in case/when things fail) I printed the articles to PDFs to save locally and have "forever" copies of the great info in them.

I stayed on your site because I've enjoyed the rest of your content, as well. I follow via RSS feed, and when I see a post pop up in my Newsboat feed, it's one of the first I open when I know I will have time to spend the time on the new article. Once in awhile there is a post above my head in technical things or not of interest to me, but I enjoy them anyway because you have a great perspective. If I don't also decide to do "the thing" you're writing about, I learn what "the thing" is, and I tuck it into the back of my mind in case at a later date I decide to do "the thing", as well. I know where to come back to. Much inspiration here.

I've been writing my own hand-coded HTML/CSS blog the last several weeks, but I'm keeping it for now on my local drive only. I ran several interest based sites in the 1990s web (also ran a BBS on FidoNet for a time back then, too). SEO and the commercial internet killed them as they did so many, and I'm hesitant to put something online until I know that I will not just be another blog that starts, posts a few times, and then gives up. Going from a blog back then that received 40,000 unique visitors a month to maybe a hundred was very disheartening. And I couldn't go with trying to make my site into another piece of commercial garbage as did some of my blogging colleagues. So my site(s) just died. This time, when (if) I have enough local posts that convince me I'm up to the challenge of long term posting, I will push it all online, at peace knowing that I'm likely to remain pretty invisible, and just enjoying the doing of it anyway.

In any event, thanks again for all you do here. It's a great site, and your efforts provide great value and interest!

Btw, I seem to fail at your date addition spammer test too often, and I'm guessing it's often because we are in different enough time zones that it puts my addition off by one when I try to comment in my evening? When I try again and pretend it's "tomorrow" here it goes through. Other times, though, it requires I use "today", instead? (Just a note).



Cheapskate
said on Mar 07th 2022 @ 07:32:00am,


Everyone, thank you for your words of encouragement.

Andy, last week I wrote a bash script to compare the IP addresses that I am blocking to the IP addresses of all the Tor exit nodes and was very surprised to discover that I was not blocking a single one! And, yes, I'm sure the script was working correctly.

Colin, I'm glad to hear you are reviving your interest in maintaining a personal website. I'm looking forward to reading your posts. I had not thought of using Pleroma for blogging. When you get your instance on the Internet, it would be great if you would write an article to let us know how you are using Pleroma for your blog, and please let us know your URL.

Lynne, I hope you do decide to put up a new website and that you pick topics that you are passionate enough about to keep it going. Please let us know your new URL if you decide to make your writing public.

I see you found the flaw in my robot test. You are exactly right. If you live in the eastern time zone in the United States and post a comment between 12 PM and 1 AM, you will have to pretend that you are posting on the previous day, because you are in my "tomorrow". If you are living in the mountain or pacific time zones and are posting an hour or two before midnight, you will have to pretend you are posting on the next day. Unfortunately, I don't see a way around this without making a more complicated robot test, and I don't want to make something that is even harder for people to use. If anyone has a good suggestion for something simpler, please make it.



Nathan
said on Mar 07th 2022 @ 10:35:27am,


I use (and can recommend) "tt-rss" on my home server to read my rss feeds. Its default fetch interval is 1 hour, which seems optimized more for big news sites than small blogs. Seems to me it should have a default interval of 1 day, and you'd need to manually increase it for busy feeds (which is how I have mine set up) -- but then the developer would probably get complaints of "why aren't my feeds updating?"



Onionman
said on Mar 07th 2022 @ 06:09:41pm,


Hi, Cheapskate.
Thanks for the article.
I was wondering: how much time in a week do you spend on maintaining your site (on average)?
I'm asking to get more of a sense of how much work this actually requires.



nick
said on Mar 07th 2022 @ 06:20:48pm,


Andy,

I had no idea this was happening, sorry about that! I'm learning as I go. I will look into this asap. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.



xwindows
said on Mar 07th 2022 @ 10:18:42pm,


@Andy, @nick,

> Nick I just want to say that when I visit https://rtfm.lol
> all I ever see is
>
> "Protected by Imunify360"
> and a CAPTCHA
> or some other means to reject me.

This might not be @nick's intention, as I will elaborate...

I'm a semi-regular Tor user; meanwhile, I also have my own personal website (work in progress), and I have been going the route of using a (local*) web hosting provider as well.

Before my personal site actually "launched", it had an elaborate hand-crafted "Under Construction" front page with artwork I've drawn. While I was admiring my own handiwork, I got curious and tried to access my own site over Tor...

Needless to say I was not pleased when instead of my hand-crafted page, I was greeted with this "Immunify360" screen which instructed me to solve the damned G**gle ReCAPTCHA in order view my own website.

I have written and configured my site to especially accommodate people who use low/old/non-mainstream tech (full HTTP/HTTPS dual-serving); and didn't enable any special "site protection" service of any brand in my hosting package, because I'm not fond of what CloudFlare and co. did to me as a visitor from Tor (or even as a clearnet traveler who opted out from the cult of JavaS'creep).

In the wake of this problem, I decided to re-check every single settings the hosting control panel made available to me... to no avail. Nothing there allowed me to disable this cursed "Immunify360" screen that always appeared when I was wearing the onion cloak.

At that point, my frustration and anger peaked to the point that I had to restrain myself hard from writing hate mail to my hosting provider.

Luckily at the time, it was just a not-yet-launched site; I could afford letting the matter rest for months, before I could bring myself to write a polite e-mail to them: letting them know of this problem, together with pointing out that the content I'm going to put on the site targets demographic that use Tor for privacy, and there will be content intended for automated programs to read (Atom feeds, Git repository, etc. which will be broken by CAPTCHAs); and kindly ask to opt my site out of the so-called "protection" so that it could reach my intended audiences.

They said they'd add my domains to their Immunify360 whitelist; and after they did, my site became viewable normally under Tor.

The point is, web hosting companies sometimes inflict these stuffs on unsuspecting clients, even that they didn't ask for it; and siteowners might have to use non-standard channel to opt out. If you have your own commercially-hosted personal site, make sure to actually test viewing it over Tor as well. Buyers beware.

-----

* "Local" in this case doesn't imply it was individual-owned SME; in this case it is a locally-registered company which I could pay a personal visit to their headquarter and datacenter building when the need arise.



Cheapskate
said on Mar 08th 2022 @ 06:53:23am,


Onionman, my best guess is that I spend an average of 10-15 hours a week keeping my site running smoothly and responding to readers comments and emails. Most of that is finding and blocking robots, which I do by hand. An automated system would be great, but I have found that some robots are very difficult to detect, and thus, hard to block automatically. An approach I could take to save time would be to just block the most obvious robots with an automated system.

Occasionally, I have to make changes to the site. For example, a few weeks ago, a reader requested that I make the dates of articles more understandable to readers. I responded by switching to 4-digit years. I had to do that by hand with the "sed" Linux command. Making changes by hand, since I don't use a CMS system, takes time. But, I frequently see articles by bloggers talking about how much time switching CMS's takes.

Mostly, I do everything by hand to prevent myself from being locked into using commercial software, like WordPress, which has its own problems and wastes time in its own ways. Doing everything by hand also gives me much more insight into how websites and the Internet work. Self hosting (real self hosting on my own hardware) helps me bypass the problems Nick and Xwindows have mentioned, but introduces others.

There are many trade-offs one has to make in running a website. The decisions each webmaster makes are probably most affected by personal priorities. I decided from day one that protecting readers' privacy and having maximum control of my website were my top two priorities. That decision has dictated everything I have done since.



Andy
said on Mar 08th 2022 @ 01:50:20pm,


Thanks Nick, Xwindows

Never surprising by how much "security" is added without our consent
or knowledge. All "for our own good", of course. A topic for another
day perhaps.



Onionman
said on Mar 08th 2022 @ 05:54:24pm,


Very cool.
Thanks, Cheapskate.



nick
said on Mar 09th 2022 @ 08:56:29am,


Andy, Xwindows

I've opened a ticket with the hosting company, and their response so far has been a bit too "brush it off" for my taste.

I mentioned it before, but I have been considering self-hosting (and Cheapskate has some great articles on this!) so it may come to that. I realize that is a lot of work, and I am still learning, but it is important to me that folks be able to connect with older browsers/hardware and do so privately if they wish.

Of course, how can we know what we are capable of we do not challenge ourselves? :)



RT
said on Mar 09th 2022 @ 01:13:59pm,


Thank you for writing this blog. I'm glad I found it by accident while looking for how to buy a cheap computer. Your gift to the world is appreciated! Hope you keep posting.



Cheapskate
said on Mar 09th 2022 @ 06:11:23pm,


Thank you RT. I'm surprised you managed to find an article of mine about buying a cheap computer in a sea of sites selling computers. I will do my best to keep writing relevant articles.



someone
said on Mar 10th 2022 @ 01:46:44am,


human need a choices that open & fair one. With it human could be in harmony state and could fullfill their needs without breaching others rights. Nowadays, that open choices still there but bit by bit erased by the Big instances** that hold strongfoot print everywhere.

personal blogger/web is kind a hero for several human out there who wants to find an "oasis" and a pure information. The most big deal between personal vs commercial/backed by Big Instance is its information integrity and sanity. The commercial one often affected by its own pursue of traffic, viewer, like, subscriber or some order from here and there.

nobody perfect, so just writedown your personal article like always ! Nice!

The world of web is still changing, because there is still personal web like yours for example, thanks so much for writing!



Oliver
said on Mar 11th 2022 @ 07:13:58pm,


i found your website while researching sustainable tech and considering buying an old cheap mobile phone (i search via https://search.marginalia.nu/) and am so glad i did! this article is so so great and your other ones have been so helpful. thank you so much for writing



Jean
said on Mar 14th 2022 @ 05:51:18pm,


Just found out about your site from a forum I belong to. This is great. I miss the websites like this that had great information. Thank you! I have this bookmarked and will stop by and read often.



declassed
said on Mar 22nd 2022 @ 03:21:34pm,


damn, the only thing left to do is my own search engine for personal websites.

I waste (waste?) a lot of time maintaining my IT infrastructure at home. Web, mail servers, DNS resolvers, VPN routes. Maybe this became possible when I lost my job. What if I had it? Good bye, the beauty then.



Cipherstone
said on May 06th 2022 @ 02:38:53pm,


You might consider looking into hosting your blog on github with a jekyll theme. The beauty of jekyll is that your posts and context are text, stored on github and there it is insanely fast and not subject to the normal types of vulnerabilities you see with Wordpress. And it costs nothing to host on github. Just point your domain to it and away you go.



rridley
said on May 06th 2022 @ 04:01:46pm,


Really enjoyed this.

I've always loved writing myself and it's been the primary way in life I could communicate with people ideas that I struggled to express verbally.

Hosting my own website gives me a small corner of the internet to formulate my thoughts into words, even if nobody else reads them.

It's always felt very therapeutic to do.



Gerardo
said on May 06th 2022 @ 04:59:09pm,


I am not a follower of your blog but just reading this was amazing.
Thanks!



Cheapskate
said on May 06th 2022 @ 07:04:57pm,


I was pleased to see that someone submitted this article to Hacker News a few hours ago and that it has received some traffic. I appreciate that a handful of people have left comments. This is one of those those times when maintaining a blog seems more worthwhile.



Max
said on May 11th 2022 @ 10:03:54am,


Found you through a link on FrontendFocus website. Great person-to-person tone and nice content, glad I clicked that link. Tried to insert a screenshot to no avail…



Lyokolux
said on May 12th 2022 @ 04:33:24pm,


>The second lesson I have learned is that when I first sit down to write I must allow the flood of ideas to flow out of me onto the page without worrying about what is coming out. If I pause to correct grammar, spelling, or sentence structure, I risk losing sight of the vision that created the words in the first place.

>One of the things that makes me happiest about running a self-hosted blog is that I can write whatever I want, and anyone can read it--assuming they can find it.

So true. I don't allow myself to write on my blog, putting much time on these readings on RSS feeds, then posting them on the shaarli.

>Some users are not aware that by downloading RSS feeds literally every two minutes, they are hogging Internet bandwidth and wasting resources.

I am refreshing my RSS feeds or twice a day :/ I didn't they were such impatient people up there. Everything exist on the Internet though.

>Personal website owners who endure may do so because they learn to view their work as a way of providing a needed service or information.

Example of lehollandaisvolant, ....

>Perhaps we should focus less on the number of visitors we draw to our websites and more on our efforts to create something of value, something that will make others just a little wiser, just a little freer, or just a little happier.

That's why I don't even have a [Mattomo](https://matomo.org/) instance

>I suspect those whose websites endure the longest are those who find joy in coding, writing, and communicating with their readers.

Seems true to me too.

>Knowing that I am not alone is a source of motivation for continued writing, not in the belief that by doing so I will change the world, but simply because I am encouraged to feel that someone should be writing about our shared concerns, someone who is not receiving a paycheck or a campaign contribution for doing so.

It is also a very easy way to share on the Internet. And this feeling to be able to reach so many people, or to make content available according to your own wishes is a great equanimity.
---
and as Gerardo said:

"I am not a follower of your blog but just reading this was amazing."

Oh wait, you have an RSS feed. Great !



Ryan W West
said on May 14th 2022 @ 09:51:47pm,


"An unexpected joy that I have discovered by maintaining a website is that it occasionally draws kindred spirits. I rarely meet anyone in person with whom I have strong common interests"
I totally agree with this statement. With a world of different hobbies and interests, finding local friends with extremely similar common interests is very rare. You might have to settle with more broad interests in order to connect with these people (which isn't necessarily bad, just isn't completely fulfilling). Whereas on the internet, you might really find those few other online people that have your very same interests.
Cool site, I'll be following you on RSS (max one ping a day!)



Ivan
said on Jun 12th 2022 @ 12:53:40pm,


I don't have a lot to say, just wanted you to feel support from a like minded soul



Cheapskate
said on Jun 13th 2022 @ 05:49:54am,


Thank you Ivan.



Herman
said on Oct 17th 2022 @ 02:17:33pm,


You've put into words what I've felt during my own self-hosting adventure. Even the small details, like when some posts generate tens of thousands of clicks and the feelings related to that achievement. The recommendations regarding the approach to writing and idea generation are exactly the same to the ones I eventually ended up opting for.

You have some great writing here and I appreciate the effort you've put into these articles.

If you ever want to reach out to me then you can find me at https://ounapuu.ee



Cheapskate
said on Oct 18th 2022 @ 03:37:50am,


Herman,

Thank you for those kind words. Your website has useful information that I plan to spend more time perusing when I get some time. You are always welcome to join our conversations on bluedwarf.top.



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