Building a Better Castle

After much indecision, I have a homepage on the internet once more — comprised of a domain name of my own, an SSL certificate, a web hosting account, and an installation of perhaps the most forward-looking web publishing platform available.

Over the last few years I have experimented with many of the popular hosted publishing platforms — from Wordpress, to Medium, Weebly, Wix, and even Postach.io — a rather clever Evernote integration. While tinkering, I could never get past the fact that my words were no longer my own — as soon as you publish to a public platform, you become their product in a strange sort of way. What’s more, you have no say in the future direction the platform takes — such as Medium’s slow pivot towards becoming a walled garden.

So what was involved in the construction of jonbeckett.com ?

It all started with a domain name. I’ve owned the domain of my own name for years. Each time it comes up for renewal I wonder about letting it go, but happily I never have — otherwise this whole escapade may have been a bit more difficult.

The next step was the choice of a hosting service. I decided on Digital Ocean, who host virtual servers in the cloud — they were significantly better value than Microsoft Azure for my purposes. They also provided a scripted installation of Ghost — a modern web publishing platform that caused something of a sensation when it appeared on Kickstarter a few years back.

After a few minutes, I had a virtual server running in the cloud, an installation of Ghost sitting on the server, and a domain pointed at the server via CloudFlare. A few minutes later I had cross-posted some content, and the site came to life.

I suppose this is where the tinkering stops, and the work begins — emptying my head into the keyboard over the coming weeks and months to share my thoughts, stories, and ideas.

Originally published at https://jonbeckett.com on December 3, 2020.