I've taken some inspiration from creators that talk about the simpler times before major platforms took over the internet. I saw a video by Eric Murphy that kind of put a finger on a sense that I've had that the internet would be a better place if more of us created independent sites instead of just using major platforms.

As a result I decided to start building this site using my preferred tools. I know that people love to use things like wordpress or static html rendering frameworks for personal sites, but I have really enjoyed my time using Python/Django/Wagtail for sites. When I created TrackHobbs.com I built the aircraft management application in Django and wanted a CMS that could integrate with data sources inside the app so Wagtail was the perfect fit.

The difficult thing with Trackhobbs.com is that it is an app that I sell subscriptions to and I am uncomfortable with making it open source, but I am also motivated to put something out there that can be open source and can be easily deployed to a service like Heroku or Digital Ocean App Platform. As a result I have decided to use Wagtail and publish this site on Github.

Publishing the source code for all to see is going to require a significant amount of discipline around configuration so that I don't commit any secrets in the repository, but at the same time this also means that anyone will be able to fork the repo and deploy it with all configuration options exposed as environment variables.

I know it's not much, but I think this is an interesting thing to make available. I don't know if this speaks to anyone else, but it's a contribution I can make to the wider internet to help make it easier for anyone else to depart from the major platforms. I'm still deciding on the license, I'm not sure if I want to go GPL, MIT, Apache, or some other license, but for now I'm not super concerned that anything I've published so far is so amazingly unique as to need license enforcement. I'll be sure to pick a license by the time I add anything really interesting. I really want to make sure that if I make something useful that it stays open and free and I'm not sure the best license to ensure that with web applications.