Opera Magni

My Latin is not good, which is why I gave this article its title. But maybe it's useful to be able to write great works. I choose to be humble here and say that such things are above me. But maybe this can be used as a sort of shuttle for those who would create things beyond my ken. Move the old thing back and forth beneath the hempen ropes and create something meaningful, if not marvelous.

I started this blog for a couple of reasons. One is that I like technology, and I enjoy engaging with it on a professional level. The internet as we know it is buggy, slow, and laden with bad actors. Through a lot of trial & error, I managed to build out a site that is generally accessible across most of the web-connected world. Anyone worth their salt in this field and a modicum of interest in how they can connect with their users should probably work towards doing so in a way that is stable and safe.

At the end of the day, we have to consider ourselves professionals on some level. Disinterested parties. We're here to de-escalate problems and ensure things flow smoothly. There are rough edges in every field.

Over the past few weeks, I've become fascinated with different Instagram reels of plumbers working with water. It's given me a lot of interest in how a professional does their job considering the lives and well-being of their clientele. Because plumbing is one of those oft-forgotten things that makes us really lucky as a people. And when a complicated problem emerges, you hope that you have someone who can fix it sans compromising the rest of the works.

A fascinating element of dealing with older systems is thinking about what your priors did before you stepped in. This is understandably different for IT than plumbing. We don't weld our joists into place, we mainly type values into frames on web pages or commit code in Visual Studio or Vim. This may get the writer fired. Some industries are more chill.

Whatever our interest, I want to put together a project that makes a (reasonably basic) web stack like this available to different users. Optimally on most available platforms, and maybe as a reasonably simple Docker image. While this might wind up just pushing the goals of Ghost as a platform is beyond my concern. At the end of the day, if someone wants to set up a website and either pay a 3rd party to host it or let it rip in their home office, that's absolutely their prerogative. But I'd like to help people close to my heart.

Hopefully putting this down on paper will be useful to the common author or maybe just to one. Or maybe it just winds up in my folder of Useful Things to Remember That You Know You Can't Remember at Will. Making it available to everybody is part of my tool belt and if you know me, you know I can't resist a cool tool.

So remind me in the future if you come across this blog post. Hopefully I can have it linked to here in due time. My optimal goal would be a GitHub repository with relevant instructions on the front. Shouldn't take but an afternoon... but obviously might take longer. I've committed to more repositories in a similar span of time.

Worst comes to worst, it's something fun. Maybe less exciting than these things used to be. But that just means it can be attained faster. And maybe help utilize the transfer of this site to its next incarnation? We will see. Always fun to try.