Lately, I feel like I've been "on a roll" with respect to technical undertakings. And meanwhile, my creative efforts have been falling painfully flat. So I've shifted my efforts in my free time from creative work (writing, my geofictions, etc.) to computer tinkering. This is the sort of behavior that led to an entire somewhat-successful but ultimately stressful career in the 2000s.
I decided, in light of this, to go ahead and invest a few dollars a month in a hosted Linux Ubuntu Server. In fact, I already have another hosted server, but it's on Windows, which I'm less skilled at hacking, and mostly I use it as a ftp spot for backing up my data and as an image server for my blog.
Having an Ubuntu server allows me to deploy actual websites and apps rather than just have them running on my desktop. And, frankly, a hosted server is a lot more reliable than my desktop – assuming I don't blow it up through some hackerish ineptitude.
So I clicked "Buy" early this morning and I made a server.
I got one of my long-neglected domain names pointed to it: geofictician.net. I hope to get other of my domains pointed there too, over time. I have a half-dozen domains that I basically barely use: jaredway.com, raggedsign.net (my old business), caveatdumptruck.com (which points to this blog), etc.
So far, all that's installed is a skeleton of a mediawiki instance (i.e. an "empty" wikipedia, basically). That's because those things are really easy to install and give a very professional-looking result "out of the box." I'll see what else I can get installed, later.
Here's a link:
See? It's really there.
[daily log: walking, 7km]