Hello there,
I'm urza and this is my new personal website (blog), where I put things worth sharing.
Not starting from scratch, I moved-in here some older ramblings of mine, mostly from kyberia.sk.
You can see them on the index page
WHY
For some time now I wanted to have "my own" place in cyberspace, or how Bastian Allgeier puts it:
So far we are only guests in a couple of gigantic hotels with barb wire around them."
I want to share stuff primarily on my own land and conditions, and not on the ones of facebooks, googles and other private corporations, that do not care about our privacy, or in fact about us at all. For if you are not paying for the service, you are not a customer, you are the product being sold.
And it is a pity, since we don't need to support this centralization of data (and data is knowledge, and knowledge is power, and centralization of power have always had bad consequences for society and people of this world). The web in it's nature is beautifully decentralized spiderweb of independent nodes connected by synapses and threads. Or so it was once. Luckily, there are people who see this as important, and initiatives are being formed to make the web decentralized, unhosted, free based on protocols rather than on companies. If you still don't see why it is important to own your data, all kittens in the world are very sad now :)
It is also my answer to which kyberia [cz/sk] or other community garden I want to invest in: none, for the web is my social network. The web itself offers me the best modality and freedom.
It does not mean though, that I would go off the social networks and never come back. Only I had reconsidered and realized, it is better to treat these places as some kind of "embassies" where you can go and meet people, but try to keep the data elsewhere as much as possible.
This little project is a first step in this direction, it is a place for texts and photos, but in longer term, I want to find a way how to leave the cloud completely and be independent on services of google and other big companies.
HOW
I wanted to have:
1. nice short URLs = of my own choosing and under my control for each post
2. freedom of modality in each post = not being restricted by some blog style or theme for all items
3. longevity and durability = not depending on any particular technology, like database, programming language etc
So I wrote a little "engine" to help me with this (I dare to welcome myself to the club of those who use their own CMS:) It is a static website generator, that I called Dibliq. My posts are in files, either .txt or .html, each post can have completely independent resources, not just styles, but everything that a html file can consists of.
Dibliq then eats these files, and spits out a static website with index, rss feed and links between posts. Because of this, the website can be hosted anywhere.. On your own server or plug machine (like RaspberryPi), or any webhosting, or even in Dropbox if you like.
I plan to opensource Dibliq and put it on github soon. If you would like to use it, drop me a line, I'd be delighted.
You can grab my RSS FEED, send me message to
Live long and prosper :_)
[1] http://thenittygritty.co/the-future-of-the-web-a-draft
[2] www.prism-break.org
[3] https://twitter.com/librarythingtim/status/13226541303
[4] http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2013/6/25/introducing-crosscloud-project-get-your-data-out-silos/
[5] https://unhosted.org/
[6] https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
[7] https://tent.io/
[8] http://userdatamanifesto.org/
[9] http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud