Good Question.
Given the million other ways of posting stuff online, you might wonder why I chose to build my own self-maintained website.
Primarily, a sense of ownership and independence that is often lacking on other online platforms. Rather than being subject to the whims of algorithms or the terms and conditions of third-party platforms, I have full control over my blog, its content, and design. This autonomy allows me to build a (hopefully) sustainable online presence that showcases my passions and expertise and connect with the world on my own terms.
Secondly, a Raspberry Pi 4B lay idle at home, seemingly without purpose, until it sparked the revival of my interest in blogging. Opting against a conventional cloud-hosted service, I embarked on a journey fueled by a combination of Docker containers for the OS, Ghost for the blogging platform, and Cloudflare Tunnels for content delivery. Given my inherent passion with all things tech, the idea of employing a Raspberry Pi as the backbone of my website proved irresistibly appealing. Setting up this infrastructure on the Raspberry Pi posed a good challenge, affording me the opportunity to engage in hands-on tinkeringβan activity I seldom find time for nowadays. Consequently, this blog now resides within the confines of a Raspberry Pi nestled in a network closet, a tangible presence within the comfort of my home, rather than being hosted on some distant server in a nondescript data center.
Thirdly, the emergence of advanced language models such as ChatGPT has revolutionized content creation, rendering it more efficient and accessible than ever. Leveraging ChatGPT's sophisticated natural language processing capabilities implies generating coherent text and refining content have become effortlessly seamless. 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" π