Is it possible to blog in the AI era?
I write short stories every now and then and I throw them online. I also have a tech blog, where I moan about the decisions software I use make and with my “infinite wisdom”, I tell them what they should be doing instead.
I used to host both on Medium, but Medium got greedy. Then it was WordPress, but now even they’re trying to be greedy bastards and use my shit for training AI.
Some would argue that WordPress paid hosting will exempt me from the AI training, but for less than 100 visitors a year, it’s not really worth the expense.
So what is the solution? I ask the greater minds of this community for suggestions.
Host your own stuff. With this little load you can do it on your own hardware with very little resources.
Yeah, I was thinking about throwing something on my Raspberry Pi, but didn’t know if I’d open the door to more issues.
It can be pretty secure if you host it behind a cloudflare tunnel. Then you don’t have to open any ports to the wild west
Thank you. I’ve heard so much about CloudFlare tunnels, but don’t know how they work. Do I just point it at an IP and port or is it much more complicated than that?
Basically you have to run a mini server (I use a docker container) called a cloudflare endpoint. From there you just enter the IPs and keys that your cloudflare account tells you to in the tunnel creation menu, and it all pretty much connects from there.
Then, on the cloudflare side, you make different subdomains point to local ports. So, for example, for connecting to qbittorrent web client, in the cloudflare menus I can make qbit.domain.example point to localhost:8080. In this case, it means “localhost” relative to the cloudflare access point you’ve made (which in my case can use localhost because its hosted on the same machine as my other docker containers, but if they are on different machines you can use local IP addresses).
I use their free plan, which is all you need if you’re just serving web content to a small number of users. You might need a domain to do this, but I don’t recall.
My layman’s understanding is you basically make cloudflare be the router, so their server/ports are what is exposed to the open internet rather than your local router.
Thank you. I run like a million Docker containers and haven’t ever gotten around to looking into this and you’ve just enlightened me perfectly. I appreciate it.
If you’re already running a million docker containers then just get a vps somewhere to host your blog. Cheapest reliable one I found last I looked was vultr. I think mine is $15 a year.
I’m glad! Halfway through writing that I got worried it was a little opaque. Best of luck setting it up. If I can do it, anyone can!
You could also spin up a $5 a month VPS somewhere like Linode.