Building My Own Web Presence

I’ve created lots of websites over the years but never stuck with any of them. This time I have the intention to keep going with it and have a place to express myself and have my own digital footprint.

Why Self-Host?

One thing that matters to me is having my own information and hosting it myself. As one example I had a portfolio hosted on Adobe Porfolio, but then decided I liked the freedom of tools and didn’t want to be locked into their system so I ended up giving up on it.

I wish I had stuck with my first website and evolved it over the years. Its 25 years old (as I write this), I wrote it myself in Perl. Its just the code to host the site, I wish I had the content still. My photo album was written by myself too in the same year. Also written in Perl.

I really enjoyed doing these myself.

I don’t like social platforms like Meta. They build those to solve their own financial benefits and use their users to their own benefit.

Also one time I had content removed by Google Youtube for violating their policies, and it was the most innocent video of my daughter playing. There was no contact to talk to or have a conversation to know more. A great reminder that if you don’t have your own data, someone else may decide to delete it or take it from you in the future for any reason.

So here I am rolling my own and owning my own data. I’m happy with that!

The Technology Stack

My technology stack surprisingly starts with Claude Code. Its amazing I can roll my own fairly custom site and customize it quickly to my own needs.

Using it, I setup and customized my own Astro.build site. Its fairly minimal, lets me add in my own code (which Claude Code writes for me), and generates a static site.

I host this myself, and you can see the code for it.

Photos Integration

I wanted to make it really easy to add photos to my portfolio online. So a simple directory in this project has photos and more directories which become projects to organize. So I can add more photos by just placing them in the directory.

In closing, welcome to my new home page on the internet.