2024, sounds so futuristic, doesn’t it? I’ve got some plans for this year and I figured what better day to post them. Not quite New Years Resolutions as I’ve started on most of these items at the end of 2023, but more how I’ll be focusing my work.
Ownership
The big things for me this year are quality and ownership. I’d like to get some proper custom emoji art and other supporting art for my videos and community, start selling some basic Merch, and upgrade my equipment where I can get the most bang for my buck.
I don’t make a ton online, but I make more than you might think; delightfully in that frustrating middle between “not worth caring about” and “actually viable to live on”. So I’ll be reinvesting where I can to keep my articles and videos up, and I even did some depressing Will writing to make sure my videos and articles are preserved in perpetuity. Hopefully.
As for ownership, 2023 saw the rise of the Fediverse which is honestly the first time I’ve been significantly positive about online spaces since web 2.0 siloed us up and sold us off for parts. The whole Twitter explosion made me rethink how much I depend on callous-to-evil corporate empires I have no control over or recourse from, so I’d like to host as much of my content on my own website that I can. It’s not easy doing that with 3000+ videos of relatively high bitrate and length…but I’m exploring my options and at least my short videos will be available on SirTapTap.com as well as YouTube.
More symbolically, I’m trying to call my videos “my videos” rather than “my youtube” and such. I make videos, I just happen to use YouTube. I’ve pulled back on many sites, but I’m still on Social Media on YouTube, Mastodon.Social, and Discord. I’m already looking for ways to self-host my mastodon presence and maybe set up a Matrix server that talks to my Discord so I have more ownership there.
The Website
Important for both quality and ownership is the physical specs of my site. I’ve already upgraded some critical infrastructure for SirTapTap.com around the end of last year, for the interest of completeness I’ll list the prices on my upgrades:
- Domain Name ($10/year)
- Cloudflare Pro Plan ($240/year)
- Linode VPS Hosting, $24 a Month plan ($288/year)
- Linode Backups $(60/year)
Mostly boring technical stuff, but the better Hosting and Cloudflare plans mean I can absorb a lot more traffic and have much less downtime. I also started a status page at status.sirtaptap.com with some nice uptime monitoring from Betterstack. I can already see that some minor, brief outages disappeared after the hosting upgrade!
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