It has been a while since I wanted to start my own blog. I have some thoughts related to Machine Learning, Energy, Longevity and Internet. I hope some of my posts will spur new thoughts in your head.
A few things to start
- This blog will unlikely be frequently updated, so if you would like to get updates - follow me on Twitter @chetvil
- I plan to write on diverse set of topics, but core content of this blog is going to be related to Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, which are areas of my core expertise
- If you would like to learn a little more about my personality - visit About me.
Under the hood
It took me a while to figure out, how do I want to host and maintain my blog platform. I had several requirements:
- Being in full control of my data and no censorship from any platform - thus only self-hosted/decentralised solution would work;
- I wanted something very cost efficient, i.e in a range of several $/mo
There were a few options:
Decentralised blog platforms
There are not that many options which I could quickly find . One was sigle.io (If you know anything else good, shoot me a message).
One problem which I had with this platform was lack of understanding who/how covers the cost of hosting. At this point it is most likely underlying blockstack platform, which as usual raised through ICO. At this point I realised that I am not sure how much trust do I have to this platform and how things will change over time, which might impact cost/data ownership in future. Thus I gave up on this direction.
Static website hosted in cloud storage
This is the option which I finally chose. I found the following blog post, which gave very nice step-by-step instruction, and highlighted the easiness of the whole approach.
From the other side Ghost is very powerful platform, which provides all the needed tooling for me (There is not much I need at this point 😊). I decided to keep the workflow of writing everything locally and deploying only static version of website to AWS. This allows me to control data (given that AWS will not censor me) and have reasonably low cost (~2$ month).
The only problem which is still not solved - how to hook up ssl certificate to my domain. There is no easy and cheap way to do so with AWS it seems.
Final remark
Some of the content here will be automatically generated with latest advanced text generation models. I feel that can bring some sense of AI to this place.
"Notice the difference between being in control and being under control."