Hello World
It's 2026, and I've decided to start a blog. The locked down walled gardens of social media platforms are out, and the open web and digital sovereignty are in.
Well, it's 2026 and I've decided to start a blog.
Hard to say why exactly, I've just been carried along by the zeitgeist I suppose. It seems like the age of all-conquering techno-optimism has come and gone, and savvy technical users are returning to the old ways. Indeed many of them, whom I greatly admire, never left. Not that blogs are even that old when it comes down to it. From what I recall, the rise of the weblog and RSS feeds was very much a web 2.0 phenomenon — but I suppose even that feels like ancient history at this point. Either way, for those in the know, the locked down walled gardens of social media platforms are out, and the open web and digital sovereignty are very much in.
Back in the day I dabbled in GeoCities, Blogger and Wordpress, as well as hand-coded HTML 1.0 drafted in notepad.exe and uploaded to my designated slash tilde username directory on my ISP's web server (as was the style at the time), but I've never made a serious attempt at writing my own long-term website. Writing the prose I mean, not the code.
Given that I'm starting completely from scratch, this project has been a stimulating opportunity to come up with a suitable domain name and learn how to register and configure it. In the back of my mind for a while now I've had the idea that I wanted to have my own domain, if only for a personal landing page and email. Furthermore, as someone who feels profoundly, painfully (some would say annoyingly and insufferably) Canadian, I knew I wanted it to be a dot ca, but I also wanted the overall string of characters to be an actual word, or at the very least to look like it could be one. After considering a couple dozen possibilities, many of which were already registered, I settled on the name Orthographica, which evokes a common word in French and a somewhat less common one in English.
Once I had the domain sorted, I had to consider what kind of website I wanted to have. Although I've been intrigued by the rise of the so-called indie web, and find the idea of hand-coding basic HTML and uploading it to a tilde user directory on a web server quite romantic, in the end I decided that I would need some kind of content management system if I am to keep this thing going for any length of time. While Blogger and Wordpress were fine for their time (I'm honestly amazed that Blogger still exists, given how fond Google is of shutting down products), and I've probably consumed more Squarespace ads than any other form of content over the past 15 years, for this pure writing project I wanted something more streamlined and modern. I looked at micro.blog that I'd previously heard a bit about here and there, but ultimately settled on the open-source Ghost project.
It's been around for over a decade now but I first learned of it last summer when version 6.0 launched, allowing sites that run on Ghost to natively integrate with Mastadon and the rest of the Fediverse using ActivityPub. At the beginning of this project I didn't necessarily think I'd be writing a newsletter, but since everybody else seems to be these days and the functionality is built right into Ghost, I figured I might as well too. All in all, it's a very nice CMS with attractive themes and a slick interface that does everything I need, and then some.
Although the Ghost project offers its own managed, first-party hosting service, it's a pretty expensive option for the beginner hobbyist. But thankfully, because it's open-source, you can host Ghost yourself if you like. Personnally, I think I would have the technical ability to figure out how to self-host and get it up and running, but I'm not sure I would have the sysadmin skills and commitment needed for long-term maintenance and security. This is where the burgeoning ecosystem of third-party managed and semi-managed Ghost hosting services comes in. I looked at several and came to the conclusion that Synaps is currently the best deal around for a fully-managed host, especially with their early adopter pricing. And for purely romantic reasons, as a nostalgic europhile and technophile, I appreciate that they are based in Eindhoven, home of the last great European electronics giant.
Finally, for an incorrigible gadget fiend like me, the final piece of the puzzle will inevitably be a writerdeck of some kind, because naturally the only thing keeping me from writing all these years was a lack of proper hardware. As we all know, writing famously requires dedicated, specialized hardware and is not at all the most basic task that literally any computing device can handle with ease. Absolutely not. But that will have to be a post for another day…
For now, I am right proper chuffed to have this nice little setup for putting words and ideas out into the world. It's hard to know where to begin when you've never written before and there's so much to write about but, wherever this leads, I would be honoured to have you along for the ride. As they say, after all, it's about the friends we made along the way.
Welcome to my website.
