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

I believe in owning and controlling my own content. You should too. Running my blog using free software on a server that I either own or pay for is a big part of this.

Is what I write here even worth reading? I leave that up to you. I pretty much write this for me. If you like it, that’s OK.

I am experimenting with writing using git both locally and on remote, hosted sites like <codeberg.org> and <github.com>. Here is what I’m working 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.

  • Acoustic guitar strings — Reviews of steel strings for acoustic guitars. So far I’ve done a long-term look at Ernie Ball Earthwood 80/20 Bronze strings.

  • Classical guitar strings — Reviews of strings for classical guitars. The first review is on Augustine gold and red medium tension sets.

  • 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:

Old Blogger sites (I can’t belive I was so all in on Blogger. This must be before WordPress caught on):

About this blog⌗

This blog is a static site generated by Hugo. It currently uses the Pixyll theme, which is not under active development as of 2024. I’m looking for a new theme.

In 2019, this site was hosted on a Raspberry Pi Zero W in the coat closet. My ISP didn’t seem to mind. I used FreeDNS to make this work on my dynamic IP, though I never really set it up server-side. 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. However, my inability to serve https from home — the ISP doesn’t allow the proper port to be opened — led me back to shared hosting.

Starting in early 2020, I began hosting at http://nearlyfreespeech.net. They have a unique pay-what-you-use pricing model that ends 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 is almost always CentOS). 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. The fact that NearlyFreeSpeech offers so much — and does all the maintenance and security — makes the service very compelling indeed. 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.

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.

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.