About Steven Rosenberg and the passthejoe blog

Note: This about file is too damn large and rambling. I need to move MOST of this to a separate entry or three.

I am a journalist, programmer, husband, father and weed-puller. Back in the days before Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, I thought blogging was revolutionary and world-changing. I still do. The ability to write what you want for the whole world to read is powerful and profound.

It’s even better when you own and control your content.

For me, a big part of this is running a blog using free software on a server that I either own or pay for.

Is what I write here worth reading? I leave that to you.

I am experimenting with writing using git both locally and on remote, hosted sites like <codeberg.org> and <github.com>. I’m thinking I should move the GitHub sites to Codeberg. Here are some things I have worked on:

• The Zen of Debian — A philosophical look at Debian, Linux and Unix and how I got here.

• The Emilio Pujol project — I began this as a way of putting the great classical guitar performer, composer and educator’s 17 variations on a study by Dionoso Aguado in Book 4 of his “Escuela Razonada de la Guitarra” into some kind of context. Now it’s more of a look at the overall “Escuela,” and the life of Pujol and his impact on the guitar.

• Guitar string reviews — Reviews of acoustic steel, nylon classical, and roundwound and flatwound electric guitar strings.

• Yamaha FG403S — A long-term review of the 2003 Yamaha FG403S acoustic guitar, which I purchased for $199 in early 2004.

Here are the other places my content appears:

• I haven’t posted on Twitter/X in a long time. I don’t plan to start again. Instead, I do my “microblog”-style posting on Fediverse/Activity Pub sites: https://ruby.social/@passthejoe and https://gts.passthejoe.net/@steven.)
• My goal is to consolidate all of my past blog posts at this site.
• My WordPress.com blog is at http://passthejoe.wordpress.com. It has a lot of posts. As of 2020, all of my Click and Feel the Nuys posts are mirrored over there. The process was easier that I thought it would be — The WordPress import even took care of the images. I think if you export from one WP blog and import to another, as long as the original blog is still live, the import process mirrors the image files and rewrites the URLs so it all works out.

2024 update: I didn’t expect the server running Click and Feel the Nuys to last anywhere near as long as it did. Right now it’s offline, broken or dead. Don’t trust corporations with your content. Always keep a backup (or many).

Old Blogger sites (I can’t belive I was so all in on Blogger. I also can’t believe that Google keeps these sites alive. I must have created these before WordPress caught on):

• This Old Mac
• This Old PC
• This Old Browser
• The CTRL Freak
• 2,000 Days in the Valley
• My Jazz Guitar Journey
• As of mid-2020, I have been checking, and I think I imported most of the posts from these Blogger sites into my WordPress.com blog. Here are the ones I checked: Jazz Guitar Journey (yes), 2,000 Days (yes)

About this blog

This blog is a static site generated by Hugo. It currently uses the Hugo Bear Blog theme, which I installed on Sept. 8, 2024.

In 2019, this site was hosted on a Raspberry Pi Zero W in the coat closet. My ISP didn’t seem to mind. I never set up dynamic DNS. Luckily my IP didn’t change during the time I was hosting like this.

Yes, there are coats in the coat closet.

The Pi served this Hugo site a lot more seamlessly than it did my Perl CGI site, but it did an acceptable job on both.

Starting in early 2020, I began hosting at http://nearlyfreespeech.net. They have a unique pay-what-you-use pricing model that can end up being very inexpensive. It doesn’t work like any other shared hosting you might be familiar with. There is no cPanel. It’s a homegrown interface, and the relationship between users, sites and billing is unique. But it works, and if you have any experience at all with running websites (or want to learn), it’s a great service.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net runs on FreeBSD, and not the usual Linux (which these days seems to be Alma or Rocky). Every site includes shell access, and NFS offers many languages, utilities and other software. They even have Hugo, should you want to do server-side builds (which I did for my almost-dead-and-gone CentOS blog.

The fact that NearlyFreeSpeech offers so much — and does all the maintenance and security — makes the service very compelling. If you don’t need a full VPN (and all the headaches that go along with configuring, maintaining and securing your own server), it’s hard to deny how good the service really is.

And you have to dig a little to tease it out, but NearlyFreeSpeech.net says they won’t charge you for using bandwidth in excess of their stated cap. That takes away a worry that is always present with the “major” cloud providers.

I had a few issues with NFSN that drove me to host elsewhere. None of these concerns will necessarily prevent me from returning to the service, where I still maintain an account. For the sake of clarity, those issues are:

• You need to start — and pay for — each web site individually. Even subdomains. You can fudge it with .htaccess, since NFS uses the Apache web server, but that’s a bit of an ugly hack. The policy is great if you have one or very few sites. It’s not so great if you are experimenting with subdomains and spinning up new sites all the time. The costs can add up.

• You don’t get your own static IP. Instead, you are required to let NFS manage the DNS for your domains, even if you don’t host the domains with them (though they do offer domain registrar/hosting service as well). Even though I knew the quirky NFS dashboard well, I prefer to manage the DNS for my domains through my domain registrar.

• And then there’s https. NFS has a pretty cool script that gets you a Let’s Encrypt certificate and then renews it for you. Of course it doesn’t work that well if you are using .htaccess to run multiple subdomains while only paying for one site. You have to do another hack where you “turn off” the multiple subdomains in .htaccess, run the cert update script, then turn the subdomains back on. Hacks upon hacks. But it’s not “worth paying 3x or 4x as much when none of these sites is doing that much traffic. Of course you can get around this by hosting sites in subdirectories instead of subdomains. But why do this if you don’t have to?

Beginning in early 2024, I got a new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, and I returned to hosting this site with the Caddy web server in my coat closet.

I love Caddy because it’s so easy. Adding domains and subdomains is just a few lines in the config file, and it handles the certs for you like magic.

License

The content in this blog is published under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, which means you are free to share it under the same license. You must attribute it to me and not use it for commercial purposes.

If you would like me to write something for you that you can use for commercial purposes, let’s talk about it.