Simply because I really enjoy building it. It feels good to capture moments in photos or words, and save them. For me and for anyone else who stumbles across it. Having my own site lets me keep my content all in one place, which I can access from anywhere. And I suppose 'content' is actually memories, thoughts and moments - life basically - which is too valuable to save anywhere else. Adding content is easy and over time I have built up a back story that I look back on almost every day. And, practically, I use my news page many times every day as my source of news.

It simultaneously serves as a...

Journal

It can be very easy to forget details of even the most important life events. Things move on, other priorities emerge and experiences can fade. Sometimes I like to capture how I felt during some of my most influential life events. Writing a blog saves that experience for me and anyone else who is interested, for example from my French Divide bikepacking adventure. Reading this back over the years means the memories are there to be relived.

Technology sandbox

Writing web pages requires a combination of skills, including HTML and CSS. Building a publishing web server, that allows me to create my content, add it as a page, play with the styling, link everything together and publish it as a web page on the internet requires fairly advanced servers-side skills. These are skills I have been developing for years. It gives me an outlet for some wellspring for technical enthusiasm (!) that my day job never seems to satisfy. Everything from uploading a photo to tagging an image into an album to tweaking a CSS file, everything is possible in a one-stop web studio. My previous server ran on Java, but 18 months after starting, the latest verion runs completely in Rust. Without having the aim of building this website, there is no way I would have been able to learn Rust. Building this site allows me to deeply understand Rust on a project that is challenging and useful for me.

Photo store

The trail of photos which document our lives is continuous and growing. They end up on social media, on our phones or languishing in a hard drive or cloud storage, none of which work for me. I like to browse through my photos going back years, like flicking through an old photo album. So I built a website where I can easily upload photos and share them with anyone. Each photo is marked to control who can view it i.e. everyone, just friends or just me. With this level of control, the same page will display different content depending who is viewing. For example, from my time at KSU in 1995.

News aggregator

Rather than hunt through news sites, be bombarded by advertising and an onslaught of visual stimulus, I prefer to use old-fashioned RSS and Atom feeds. These allow me to pull the headlines into my site and then view the headlines from all my favourite places. No adverts, no noise and less mental load when checking the news. I literally use this page 10 or 20 times a day during a typical work day, would not be without it. In addition, I can pull in feeds from my favourite bloggers, checking these for updates every day or so.