On the creation of bass2nick.com

Whether someone is bothered by...

...the excessive tracking and analytics elements present on most any site that receives a large amount of traffic, (over)reliance on JavaScript for basic function, and the potential MITM (man-in-the-middle) of CDNs (content delivery networks) such as CloudFlare, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, among countless other supposed deficiencies (depending on your views)...

...is not so much of a question as "Are many people at all aware of these 'issues?'" Should they be?

Indeed, it does seem that people who more than vaguely care about privacy for the sake of it are rather scarce.

Being on the further end of this curve, though not quite lost in some place four standard deviations out, has led me to understand that software does not need to be difficult to set up- provided there is relevant documentation available (which is sadly often not the case).

From Thoughts to Reality

In obtaining a domain name (what you type in to reach this website), I first had to know that you find a domain registrar to purchase from, that you link your server's address to your domain name using your registrar's service, and that this is generally accomplished the same way using any registrar, though they might decide to call the page you put this info into something colourful, such as "define DNS" or "total domain control."

But a domain name does not a server host- that is the domain of server providers. After sifting through dozens of said, comparing rates, thinking about how much processing, RAM, and storage I needed, I settled on what seemed like the simplest option: the one with no bells-and-whistles, no fancy web interface to wrangle with, just access over SSH. In hindsight, this probably made the process more difficult, but there are people who might do things a certain way specifically because it is more difficult, and I may perhaps be like that at times. Often I find that "convenience" features simply limit your options, and it is far easier to overcome a steep difficulty curve rather than a shallow one if, after having climbed, the easier option leaves you on a much shorter hill from which you can see much less.

There is a term, "analysis paralysis," that describes why I sometimes take so long in making decisions. Before I made this site, I suffered from the problem of caring too much about which software I chose for which purpose to even get around to having a place to run any software. In these situations, I might advise you to "just get over it and choose something." Perhaps not a very "nice" solution, but when you understand that it does not matter which *BSD, Linux distro, etc you use, nor whether you run Apache or nginx or some-such. Things that aren't viable probably wouldn't have millions of users, yes?

I wrote the HTML/CSS for this site mostly through my little SSH out-of-band console. The site does not have all the nice features I might want, however, it works, and I can reasonably re-write it from scratch in a day. I cannot say if I would do it the same way a second time, as writing HTML is kind of a waste of time, but I do also really appreciate old-fashioned sites, where the author is not relying on giant looping videos in the background and three sentences spread across three viewport heights with a pointless parallax effect in order to get their point across.

There you go. I'm not the smartest guy around, but I can at least manage to put out something. If you've the patience to read this far into this article, you have the requisite attention span to achieve what you want. Go, read some articles, fill in the gaps that no forum seems to be covering using your reasoning skills, and maybe even have some fun along the way.

Nick