My name is Evans Tucker, and this is my personal website. I like to write things and share them. On October 11th, 1999 I launched my original website - it was a PHP content management system (CMS) that had themes and a comment system that I wrote myself - I was really proud of it! Then I tried to migrate it to Blogspot, but I gave up. After that I spent a lot of time on Friendster (now defunct), MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Somewhere during all of that, I got married and had kids, which significantly reduced the amount of time I had to write posts - it takes me a long time to write because I revise every sentence a dozen times. Also, surveillance capitalism ruined all the big social networks - now they’re 90% ads and re-shared posts instead of original content written by my friends. Don’t bother interacting with me on the old social nets - I just use them to syndicate content.
Most recently, I’ve been experimenting with decentralized peer to peer (p2p) or federated social networks like Peepeth, Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) (follow me at @+P2O1Nw+3vlcyff4z9VHp5J3cLfn6j4eTHtCEwB5P/w=.ed25519 and @8nzvyQkPgS42H5ZB9gU0zubkYzSLE6wldS5O3Uba1VY=.ed25519), Peertube, Mastodon, and Pixelfed. And I’m now re-launching my own self-hosted content. I intend to Indieweb’s POSSE “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” practice. I’ll be posting all content on this site, and then posting links back to this site on the appropriate social networks. I’m doing my part to redecentralize the Internet! I encourage you to post your content on your own website too! Indieweb has a great “Getting Started” page.
Over the last year or two, I’ve been contemplating what software and protocols I wanted to use to relaunch my site. What follows is what I’ve settled on and why. None of this is set in stone and I will try to adapt as the technology evolves. This site is written in Markdown because that’s what Hugo uses and it’s fairly simple and human-readable compared to HTML. It’s all saved in a git repo and pushed to this GitLab repo for version control. I use GitLab because it’s potentially self-hostable (although I’m using their SaaS platform currently). Each push triggers this GitLab CI pipeline. GitLab CI is just what I’m familiar with - it seems that there are not many good options for self-hostable, universally compatible CI/CD - there’s Jenkins, which is a little too mature, and maybe on the newer side, there’s Drone, but it was recently acquired by Harness and I don’t know which direction they’re going to go with it. The pipeline builds a static site with Hugo. I want the final site to be static, because a dynamic site requires more maintenance, upgrades, and CPU. Keep it static, keep it simple. After the the site is generated with Hugo, it is published to Web3.Storage, which is part of the amazing Interplanetary File System (IPFS)! This is important, because anyone can save or “pin” the site and keep a working copy and keep it online. This is as decentralized as it gets. Also, as long as a pin of this site exists, it will always be available via any of the IPFS gateways! Finally, I post the updated IPFS CID to my DNS to make it available at https://evanstucker.com/.