After years, I’ve pulled the trigger on a dedicated website of mine. It’s bare bones for the moment, but it will gradually evolve.
Now why am I making an atomicpoet.com when atomicpoet.org already exists and I’m active there?
The difference between .com and .org
Well, atomicpoet.org is an Akkoma site that requires a login to see remote content. It’s pretty much a private Fediverse site for my family. In other words, it’s not for other people, it’s for me.
The other reason is that, with 20K+ posts (at last count), atomicpoet.org is simply not a good archive for my long-form content. I’m sure I can find some of it if I do a deep-dive search. And I likely will do just that. But for stuff I want to re-visit, it’s better to host it elsewhere.
Which brings me to why I’m particularly excited about atomicpoet.com.
Fun with Hugo
I’ve tried WordPress, Joomla, Ghost. They require lots of maintenance and expense. Which is why I’ve largely avoided a website for so long.
But after closely considering my options yet again—something I’ve periodically done for decades—I realized that what I want is something as simple as possible. And cheap.
Well, I stumbled onto Hugo. I might be late to the party, but I like this party quite a bit. This is as simple and cheap as it gets.
In less than an hour, I got this site up and running with Hugo. I simply downloaded Hugo to my MacBook, created a Git repo, then connected the repo to Cloudflare. The hardest part really was just getting my custom domain to work.
The cost? FREE.
The smolweb
Periodically, I try and get into the so-called “smolweb”. Which, to me, is just the web. Pretty much, the smolweb is a collection of people who want their own space on the Internet without being beholden to algorithms and the outrage machine.
To me, the appeal is about power. When you’re on a social media site, someone else decides whether or not your work is worthy enough to be seen. I have spent hours of my life painstakingly doing research, crafting each word—only to have it be buried because a moderator simply decided it shouldn’t be seen.
But on the smolweb, your work stands on its own. Your audience is your own. Anything you make exists on its own.
That alone is worth making my own site.
Where to go from here?
Ultimately, this site will exist as an archive for my writings about art, humour, video games, tech, music, and the stock market.
It will host stuff I’ve put a lot of effort into creating, as opposed to my many offhand posts on atomicpoet.org. Ideas that deserve some form of permanency, at least as permanent as the Internet can get.
Over time, I may expand this further. But for now, I’m keeping things simple and easy to update.