Experimentation

Ghost looks clean and elegant compared to WordPress but with one serious hurdle, price. Hosting solutions for Ghost range from 13-16 USD per month, which is huge compared to “free” for wordpress, but also in regards to the volume of traffic our blogs get. Is it worth spending 15 CHF per month for a blog that no one reads?

Full Ghost Clone of This Blog

Two days ago I was playing with Ghost locally. I tried to export my blog to ghost via the full export tool, failed, and then tried again via the JSON tool and this time I had success. I then instantiated an instance on the laptop I’m blogging from, before importing the json file.

From what I see the aim of AI companies is not to provide human beings with great tools to speed up work flows, to automate menial tasks, and to enhance our daily work lives. It is to replace us. For this reason I don’t like that there is so much hype about AI.

Listening to the Keen

At the same time as I write this I have been to half a dozen, if not a dozen talks about Vibe coding, AI workflows, MCPs, Agents and more. I have also played with Claude, with Le Chat, with MyAI and many other products. I have played with it to correct my french grammar and more.

When I was flying between England and Switzerland regularly I packed so that everything would fit into a bag that I could take on board. When I travel by car I pack less effectively. Today I have two tents, two different types of sleeping bag, a sleeping mat, a Bare Dry suit inner suit, a single set of via ferrata stuff, crocs, hiking shoes and trail glove 7s on my feet.

While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with.

Installing the OS is easy. Download NixOS, flash it to a USB stick, reboot a computer onto the OS on that USB stick and begin installation of the OS.

Since getting the Raspberry Pi devices my shift has moved from following tutorial after tutorial to experimenting with setting up a number of server projects fron Home Assistant to Nextcloud to Photoprism and Immich to name a few. In the process I have instantiated and then pulled down plenty of instances before finally deciding to keep certain instances up and running for longer, to see whether I can use them. I also experimented with CUPS and set up a printer/scanner for remote use.

Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.

I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them. I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi 8GB. I chose this device because it’s the highest spec pi available at the moment without months of waiting. I could have used an HP Elite Book from several years ago but I want a machine that can be on permanently.

Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with Nextcloudpi. The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.

Although I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve I have been experimenting with ClassicPress and the Fediverse, but rather than do it from my main blog I have decided to experiment within a subdomain and so far I have achieved much. I see that activitypub and webfinger can be installed on ClassicPress.

I checked that a webfinger was created and displayed correctly but this took trial and error. The biggest error is that to create a webfinger that is valid you must come from an https hyperlink. If it is not secure you get a “socket not secure error”. I found a solution, by creating classicpress.main-vision.com for the sake of testing.

The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better. I am now writing my blog in Hugo first, and then moving the content over to Wordpress at the moment. I could just replace my Wordpress blog with Hugo but I don’t for two reasons. The first reason is that I’m experimenting, and if I change my mind about something, I can, without affecting Quality of Service. The second reason is that I believe that the production server should be in fine working order with as little downtime for users as possible. With one or two projects on the fediverse this isn’t the case. Downtime can be for hours, or even days at a time.