Intro

This is a write-up of an idea that’s been noodling around my head for a few weeks, coming out of a new year’s resolution to get my personal backups sorted out.

If you’re a self-professed techie like me, chances are you have a lot of data “lying around”, including photos, videos, music, and various VMs, docker installs and git histories. You’ve probably looked into various cloud storage schemes over the years, and have various forgotten hard drives lying around in desks.

I have a theory that we’ve got ourselves into a pickle when it comes to using our devices; a dead-end of interaction. I think we’ve actually talked ourselves into having slow, busy sites that overwhelm us when we load them up. It’s as if we need more complex content and visual bang-whizzery to justify the cost and innovation that goes into a new phone, tablet or laptop. “Technological fulfilment” - like needing to run the latest game on the newest hardware, just because we can. Justification for some retail therapy to pick up something newer, that makes everything “fresh” again.

TL;DR: The technology we have now isn’t an inevitable state of affairs, but has come from a long-term series of cultural choices. We still see short-term profit as the main aim of technology, which discourages other cultural views, lifestyles and priorities within the sector. But we can think about technology in terms of people more, and take active steps to break out of a monocultural loop.

This post is a set of personal reflections and follow-on thoughts following a fascinating workshop session. I’m hugely grateful to Hannah for inviting me along, and for kickstarting this post and this chain of thoughts.

The emptiness of the text editor gives rise to the first sentence. Soon, punctuation arrives, alongside the first typo. Squiggles give way to semantics, indentations form ideas. I glide across the editor like an ice skater.

Yesterday, a very interesting talk on zero waste web design. A picture of a pony leads to a comment about brutalist web design leads to a link to this slide deck: IT WAS NEVER ABOUT LEARNING TO CODE by F Okoye. Economy of construction, pure functional design, and yet within these structures are labyrinths.

Optimising the 6work Wordpress Site on a 2014 Raspberry Pi

Today, I spent a nice gentle couple of hours optimising my weeknotes blog at 6work.exmosis.net. For context, here’s the server it runs on:

I’ve looked into optimisation for it before, as the Pi was falling over whenever I posted a link to Mastodon - decentralised networks are great, but each federated server was also requesting a copy of the site, effectively DDoSing myself with a single post.

Obligatory “FRIST PSOT” post. I have been largely following this tutorial so far, and things have been mostly fairly smooth. My own approach has been:

• Install hugo via snap, as I’m on Ubuntu 21.10 (snap install hugo --channel=extended)
• Run through the new site setup to create a new directory
• Set up a new github repo and clone it
• Copy the new site files into the git repo and push
• Clone the beautifulhugo theme as a submodule, as suggested (glad I had all that submodule wrangling before now, aren’t I, eh, eh?)
• Push
• Sign into Netlify via Github, giving it just access to the one repo
• Set up new site, roughly in line with the tutorial steps
• Set up hugo.groundlake.org over at Mythic Beasts which is hosting the groundlake.org domain, in line with Netlify’s instructions
• Verify the DNS - this was fast, but not entirely sure if it has worked. HTTPS seems to work when I access the site, but adding SSL seems to report “missing certificate”, and I got an email from Netlify about mixed secure/non-secure content, which the browser doesn’t report.
• Figure out how to post this content. I’ve set up a ‘2021’ directory within my ‘posts’ directory, just in case I end up using this for years and years. Running ‘hugo server’ seems to see it fine.

(Actually, I originally added the theme as a clone before the parent was pushed, but undid that once I realised Netlify couldn’t see it.)