Sunday 16 August 2026

Some changes to my website and self-hosting

Offgrid Holdout has gone through quite a few iterations trying to find a place for it. It originally was a SSH BBS, then a small web site, then a pubnix.

Now, I’ve taken it back to something simple and manageable. It’s running a very bare bones WordPress with a totally custom designed theme. All the unnecessary fluff in WP has been taken out and things tightened down. The theme wraps everything nicely and plugins are (right now) less than 5 (one is a custom designed plugin to display my self-hosted Navidrome music).

I also have moved closer to federated connections as opposed to the small web. I still maintain a small web presence and believe in it, but federation fits me better int he nice gray area between the modern web and the small web.

Another reason for the change is I wanted to decommission the VPS that Offgrid Holdout was running on. Moving to one of my VPS that hosts other websites allowed me to do that and save some money in the process.

While I was doing that I decided that I had a computer running services on a local server that I could easily migrate to another local server, so I spent the day yesterday moving those services, tightening up the server they moved to, and updating my infrastructure documentation. In three years of just having my daily desktop I have a lot more services on 3 local servers running that back then. Sprawl and keeping things tracked and documented takes more time than you would expect.

I’m really going to try and stay on track with this blog. I think I will.