2020-07-25-My-dream-for-a-personal-website

My dream for a personal website

(post 1 of #100daystooffload)

I found an option on my webhost, Nearly Free Speech, to change the server type I had from Apache + PHP to just plain Apache, so I thought that maybe I had an "in" for hosting gemini with NFSN and not having to change hosts.

I've been thinking for a little while now about merging my gemini presence into one place, beginning with reading

solderpunk's post about it.

I could merge everything into my account at breadpunk.club, which I'm toying with still, but I would really like to have it all under my *own* name at

gemini://acdw.net

(which won't work right now, by the way -- but I'm including the link here for when it someday does :) ).

Which brings me to finding that option -- I thought the main thing keeping me from running a gemini server on NFSN was the limitation on running custom servers alongside PHP in their configuration, so when I saw the plain Apache option I decided to try it. I switched the sucker on, installed molly-brown in the space, configured it, and switched that on ---- NOTHING.

I thought, maybe I have to run it through the web admin interface, so I wrote a small shell script, plopped that in the daemon interface, and said "Go!" ... NOTHING. AGAIN..

So I went to the fora for NFSN, and searched for "gopher" -- since gemini is so new, I was sure there wouldn't be any questions on that, but I figured *someone* had tried to set up a gopher server. And they had. So I clicked on the thread title with bated breath, and found out ........

NearlyFreeSpeech.net ONLY serves HTTP (80) and HTTPS (443). Nothing else. Not interested.

So I have to get another host, it looks like :/

(Luckily, I was contacted and might be able to share with someone else...so we'll see!)

Wait, but this post was about the DREAM of a personal website!!!

Sorry, I'm a little tipsy and forgot the main thrust of this article.

I think what I want for my personal website, that is, acdw.net, is this:

the HTTP site, that is,

https://www.acdw.net

will be sort of a "portfolio" site, where I can advertise myself to the corporate world, hopefully to be hired as a freelance writer or something like that. Whereas, my gemsite, rather,

gemini://acdw.net

or

gemini://gem.acdw.net

will be my *personal* space, where I can "hide in plain sight" -- I don't think I'll be heinous or anything like that, but I want to have a "back room," as it were, to be myself away from the corporate considerations so many of us have to live through as we navigate the capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in.

It'll be somewhere that I can be truly *weird* -- I think that'll be fun.

And if someone finds me from the corporate world, I think they'll be weird enough to appreciate it.

Maybe that's the true value of a non-mainstream protocol ... people have to come looking for you, and if they're looking, they're probably ready to see the real thing.

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