A year of blogging

Yesterday marked one year since I first published my blog. I think it's safe to say that it hasn't been an unqualified success, but I've decided to keep going and see where it takes me.

Despite setting out to document my self-hosting and homelab journey, somehow I've only managed 1 post that was actually about self-hosting. I've been hosting my own apps - I've added some, removed some, gone through debugging battles and earned some scars, but I've failed to publish posts about any of it. I've got a pile of draft posts covering some of it, but that's no good to anyone.

Goals for 2026

So, 2026 - the world is in chaos, the horrors persist, but so do we. Here's what I'm currently thinking about doing:

• I've recently migrated my desktop PC from Windows 10 to Kubuntu. It hasn't been all smooth sailing, and there's still one driver giving me grief, so I need to spend some time on that.
• I've bought a second-hand OpenWRT-compatible router that I need to set up, so that's an opportunity to improve my networking knowledge.
• After hearing some horror stories, I definitely want to mirror my pi-hole onto a second raspberry pi so that I've got some redundancy there.
• I'd like to learn more about Kubernetes, so I hope to move at least some of my self-hosted apps to Kubernetes from Docker Compose.
• I want to make better use of Home Assistant, tying it into a few more things and setting up some usable dashboards.
• I'd like to experiment with setting up a home LDAP server.

Honestly, on top of a full-time job, that sounds like quite a lot. I'm also working on an app (but then, I always am... CommitStrip: West Side-project story is pretty accurate for me). Let's see how things go.

Year 1: Vital statistics

• Blog posts published: 7
• Unfinished draft blog posts: 7+
• Redesigns: 1
• Technology changes: 0
• Visitors: unknown
• Views: unknown
• RSS subscribers: unknown