Good Question. Given the million other ways of posting stuff online, you might wonder why I chose to build my own self-maintained website.
First, there’s the sense of ownership. A blog gives me control I do not usually get anywhere else. No algorithms, no shifting terms and conditions. Just my words, my design, my rules. If I am going to build a tiny corner online, it may as well sit quietly on my own terms.
Second, there was a Raspberry Pi 4B sitting idle at home, mostly unused, until it conveniently became the excuse to set this up. I did not want a regular cloud service, so I ended up piecing it together: Docker for the OS, Ghost for the blog, Cloudflare Tunnels to push it out. I genuinely like messing with tech for no particular reason. Setting all this up on a Pi was exactly the kind of hands-on tinkering I rarely find time for anymore. Now the whole thing lives inside a Raspberry Pi in a network closet at home instead of some faraway data center. Feels better that way, somehow.
Third, language models like ChatGPT quietly changed how fast ideas turn into words. Generating text, shaping it, tidying it up - all happens more easily now. I still have to think, but the bits that used to drag on for hours don’t anymore. In essence, I wrote this post in a fraction of the time it would have taken a decade ago, as exemplified by the swift composition of this very page - "Powered by ChatGPT" 😀