I’m looking for a way to start something like my private diary, for friends. Not public. I’d like to write some personal things there, for it to be accessible via the Internet, but not public. Not be crawled by bots, search engines.
Maybe, I could even make an effort and translate my posts to multiple languages, so different people could read what I write.
Not sure about that. Most times I think English, and write English too. For those people who know no English (Russian speaking, most times) … well, honestly, they could auto translate my posts, if they wanted to. Also, I think I may not want that audience anyway. Why would I? What for?
However, sometimes I think in Ukrainian too. I may want to write that language either.
If it’s going to be password protected, then it could be hosted on Netlify or Vercel. I read it has something like that out of the box. Or Cloudflare Access. But it’s something more complicated, I expect.
Also, I may want to have a CDN for that. Shouldn’t be too difficult, yet I’d like it to be publicly accessible while being hosted on my own hardware.
- I expect a 500 GB drive to be plenty for many years. Even a 120 GB SSD may be sufficient for a very long time, so I can start with what I have at hand.
I’m having this thoughts for over a year now. Yet, what estranges me from this idea is that … well, are there anyone who is actually interested in what I could write? I can personally spam someone via private messages, uninvited. And I don’t like it for many reasons. The most obvious one is being — even a person might be perfectly happy to have me and my sudden thoughts there — they may be in no context at that very moment they receive the message, yet they may lose / forget about that message over time. Perfectly natural at this epoch we live in, the epoch of overwhelming information.
Will this new website help? I don’t think so. They will never read it. They would read it once a year, I think. But on the other hand, I can easily link some posts to them in chats. That way things would be super private — more private, at least — compared to sending them via, e.g. Telegram. Especially the media, since media is planned to live at my servers.
At this moment, I think it’s worth trying, and if it won’t work out, at least I’ll stop thinking about that. Sounds reasonable to me.