~ tsquad's Blog

Had Good Intentions

January 11th 2021

After my last post I made a few new edits to the design, nothing huge. The following day we got into a discussion in irc about privacy and security, and user low-key sent me on a 2 day rabbit hole derail on privacytools.io. This led me to switching all my devices from Google Chome to Firefox, which has actually gotten a lot better since my last try 10 or so years ago. I also made the decision to delete my unused Twitter and Instagram accounts and delete the apps off my phone. I have always been in the ""I have nothing to hide"" camp, but I realized, that was a flaw in my thinking. I shouldnt have to settle like that. I may not have anything to hide, however, it's no ones business what I do on the internet. I may not go all in on ditching everything that breaks my privacy like Facebook and fully ditching Google. But baby steps I guess. I did make a protonmail account that I plan to use for anything new, and I have also changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo which I dont really feel like I'm missing anything over Google search. I have the desire to set up a NextCloud server, but I am not sure if I should self host in my home, or pay for a VPS for it. VPS will be VERY expensive due to the amount of storage I will need for me and my family, but the secutiry of having it off sight and away from threat of fires and power surges is tempting.

I have been looking into some other social network options like Mastodon, Friendica and the Reddit alternative, Aether. The only one I really understand at this point is Aether, and I feel like it has potential, it just needs more users and a bit of refinement. Mastodon and Friendica I have not used enough to have an opinion yet, so we shall see.

First update post

January 8th 2021

So I did not do as originaly intended. After my first blog post, I went ghost. I can make excuses, but there are none. Between video games and Netflix, I lost my way. Have watched quite a few good shows for what thats worth. However, within the last week I have been getting back onto the tilde. Today I decided to do some CSS work on my blog so it doesnt look like such a basic black text white background site. Ran into a good learning experience. I had never made edits to a live web page before, only text documents I have stored localy on my machine. I had not realized there would be cache issues. With some help from the great IRC community here, shout out to jan6 for that, I was able to get this issue resolved so that I could see my changes through Chrome. In the end I was able to make the background black, the text two different shades of green to match the tilde.team site, use the same font from Google fonts to match, and I added a white border around each post to separate them a bit. In the end, I am pleased with how it looks so far. I might start adding links to my posts for sites that I mention. I would like to add a nav bar to the top, but I am not sure what to put on it quite yet.

In all today was a productive day. I will probably still tinker around a bit tonight.

~tsquad

My first blog post

August 25th 2020

tilde. What is it? Im still not quite sure myself. This is all very new to me. I love the idea of a community of users, helping eachother, learning new things and just having fun. I have been a member for a few months now, but I have been inactive for the majority of my time as a member. I really want to learn web development, so I plan to use this platform to learn HTML, CSS, and Java Script. I am not used to using cli programs like weechat for irc, and nano/vim for text editing, so that will be fun to figure out. I feel like I need to take a class to learn the tools, to learn the languages I want on here. I am much more used to using Sublime Text, and I much like the mouse support it offers for highlighting text, and copy/paste/delete. Im currently using nano, and I'm sure there are equivilent commands for the functions I'm used to, but I just need to figure them out. I have previously had a few websites that I hosted on Blue Host, using Wordpress. They were both blogs, but I did not put enough into them for them to provide any real value. I love technology, but I feel the tech blog scene is far to crowded to make a successful blog on the toppic, especially while learning. I am currently going through freecodecamp.com to learn HTML and CSS. I have tried a few Udemy courses, but the video format tends to put me to sleep unfortunetly. I like the text format of freecodecamp.com and I am able to get through a lot more content that way.

Anyway, this is hopefuly the start of a great learning experience for myself. On this blog I plan to document my journey and the new things I learn so that some day I can look back and see how far I have come. To any reading this, I hope your enjoy my journey, and remember, keep learning.

~tsquad