this blog, and the whole domain phanisvara.com, are more of a playground than fulfilling a real need. i'm not trying to sell things or promote my ideas – for now. but it's handy to have an address where i can publish something to show to others, try out if and how things work, and yes, a place where i can say things in public and point to it so others can see it.
i re-did my digitalOcean droplet, a tiny cloud-server i use to work on web projects for others, play around with stuff myself, or even play minecraft once in a while.
this time i made the server smaller, losing it's content. but things had gotten stale anyway: libraries left over from things i'm not using anymore, configuration changes on top of earlier, long forgotten ones. a fresh start can be a good thing, once in a while.
besides this ghost blog the server hosts a basic mail server (postfix & dovecot), apache2 and nginx webservers, MySQL and postgreSQL databases, an instance of discourse, a nifty web forum i use for comments in this blog, and TinyTinyRSS, a news-reader and -aggregator.
for now, phanisvara.com is made up of these components:
- https://phanisvara.com – the domain itself, presently only an <h1> heading with the domain name. normally this is where ever changing and evolving django apps can be found;
- https://mail.phanisvara.com – a mail server to handle incoming and outgoing mail for the domain;
- https://blog.phanisvara.com – this blog site, an instance of the opensource publishing platform ghost;
- https://news.phanisvara.com – Tiny Tiny Rss, a free and open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator;
- https://disc.phanisvara.com – the discussion platform discourse. from their about page:
Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern Internet discussion forum should be today, in a world of ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter.
i don't see myself discussing much in the near future, but having a blog where i can say things in public means i'll have to allow others to comment, give their point of view, too. i don't use facebook anymore and other comment platforms like disqus either cost extra money, or spam you with advertisements & track you all over the net. that's where discourse comes in, providing comment functionality for this blog;