Starting a blog...
Hello everyone, and welcome to my new blog! I will mostly use this to share my thoughts regarding technology. You will probably see articles on the philosophy of FOSS, some tutorials (particularly related to Linux), technology related to archival (e.g., audio and video codecs?), and various other things I feel like writing about.
Why?
I want to share tutorials, information, and thoughts on various topics that interest me.
As for why I prefer to do this on my own blog (rather than say, a social media account), I strongly believe that the technology we use should be controlled by us and decentralized. Just as using GNU/Linux over proprietary operating systems can free us and our own property from outside control, favoring open protocols such as HTTP, RSS, and more can allow us to take control of our own communications. Let's keep the internet a public resource used by all, controlled by all, and shared by all. (And also, restore net neutrality to ensure this can stay a reality.)
These days, fewer people seem to write blogs, typically resorting to social media platforms to publish content. There is certainly convenience and a pre-existing audience to be gained from this. However, social media platforms are centralized entities, meaning we ultimately have no control over our own digital identity, platform, and profiles. It would be great if we could trust them, but as we see time and time again... they do not have our best interests in mind -- we are their products really. Luckily it doesn't have to be this way. The internet was always meant to be a decentralized place, where we can all serve and participate in our own content independently (yet interconnectedly) though common protocols. After all, nobody runs "the" email or "the" http server, yet we can all use them and connect to them!
A blog also grants us more freedom in the literal sense too-- I can design and style this website however I want!
How?
I generally prefer the simplest solutions whenever possible. They are easier to maintain, fix, or switch out.
- For server hosting I use Linode.
- For generating the blog I use bashblog. It takes input as markdown files and generates pretty much everything you see here from it, including the RSS feed and tag lists. I learned about this awesome tool from Tatsumoto's blog, which you should check out if you're interested in using free software for learning the Japanese language.
- I set up the email server using Luke Smith's emailwiz.
- I'm aware that Luke tends to be extremely controversial in the Linux community, and I personally disagree with a lot of his political/religious views. However, I strongly believe we can disagree with a person's views while still appreciating and respecting a person's creations and contributions to society. On that note I found his mail setup script and his tutorials to be very useful and I strongly appreciate his effort in creating it for the community.
Coming soon
I plan to write an article exploring digital audio formats and various audio codecs, with some recommendations and debunking common misconceptions regarding digital audio encoding. This is a topic I have been dealing with a lot lately and I commonly see a lot of misinformation or incomplete information about it. Since it took a while for me to sort through the mess, I would like to create a single page with all this info in one place. Additionally, I might write a tutorial on some common tasks for handling audio, particularly in a Linux environment.