Updates to Technology Projects

I’ve had several technology projects running for a while now and thought it was time for an update.

Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like

Back in February I set up a Nextcloud server and incorporated OnlyOffice. The concepts are pretty cool, but I have abandoned both of those projects. In all honesty, having completed my dissertation, I write so little that requires a word processor that I’ve not yet found a need for OnlyOffice. And when I do need such services, I have LibreOffice available on all of my computers. MS Office is on its way out since I no longer need to power of a word processor for my writing and my licenses are beginning to expire. (I still have a couple of licenses that will be expiring soon.)

Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like

Every once in a while I get this notion that I need to move my data off of sites like Dropbox, OneDrive, and so forth. When I do, I start playing around with self-hosted services such as NextCloud, OwnCloud, and so forth. I’m currently in one of those cycles and have been playing around a good bit with Nextcloud.

I’ve even coupled it with OnlyOffice so that I can edit documents in the

Learning the Challenges of Jekyll

So a few days ago I decided to use Jekyll to generate a static website to host all – well, most – of my writing. Jekyll, I’ve learned, is a different beast from most applications used for these purposes. I’ve found several themes that I really liked, but they all had some sort of quirks that made them less easy to use. I’m finding, though, that “easy to use” and “Jekyll” probably don’t belong in the same sentence. Each of the themes I’ve looked at require slightly different structures, use categories differently, and just generally appear rather finicky. I’m sure for people that have played with it for quite a while, these quirks are just part of the landscape. For people like me, who haven’t really spent much time with the software, it’s a challenge.

Blogging with Jekyll

Over the past nearly 10 years I’ve tried numerous times to maintain a blog. I enjoy writing and figured it would be a good way not only to practice the skill, but to share my thoughts with others. I don’t really care whether anyone reads my work, to be honest; I just want to write.

The problem is that, while I don’t care so much if I’m read, I do want to be able to keep my files and refer back to them from time to time – something of a journal (which is what the blog was originally conceived to be). That means that I need the writing in form that is easily saved and retrieved. Another concern has been that I be able to write from essentially any computer, any where. I started, as most folks do, on Blogger, then moved to Wordpress, each time abandoning my work and the platform, as I moved to another. That’s not what I intended. Making the process more difficult is that the writing is stored in a database. This makes retrieval of the raw data difficult, particularly if you’ve forgotten the password, or the database is corrupt, etc. And, to be honest, those platforms are simply more complex than my needs. What I needed was a simple, easy to use platform that allowed me to maintain a file of my work.