Not a whole lot to say here, but I wanted to let folks know that there are some minor to moderate changes here at Scopique HQ.

Ever since I started to embrace the Fediverse I have been leaning more into FOSS and taking my personal concerns out of the hands of The Man. This isn’t some revolutionary streak to topple the Powers That Be — I could never use Linux as my primary OS — but rather that I’m finally taking advantage of the opportunities that have been there, and that are increasingly there, for learning and being “a better technologist”.

I set up a home server running Linux, and my original plan was just to have it as a home storage location for all of my screenshots, archived files, and projects. I also wanted to run several Docker containers to help with development. That opened the door to many interesting platforms, assuming I could get the configuration right. I run a personal wiki, a few development database, and as of this morning, a WordPress instance.

I have been hosting websites since the mid 90’s. Back when I worked for a web development company I had as much space as I wanted. When I left that company, I had to pay for my hosting. I started out creating my own sites, but eventually got tired of that so I switched to WordPress because it was the biggest name in customizable blogs at the period when I made the switch. I ran Levelcapped.com for a good number of years but when I started posting about more diverse topics I realized I was no longer in the gaming-centric sphere, so I snapped up Scopique.com and let Levelcapped.com loose in the fields (sadly, it got snapped up by a name farm. I should have sold it to LevelCap Gaming).

So with the home server and my newfound love of containers, I finally made the initial steps in moving Scopique.com to my home server. As of right now, you are reading this post as it is served from my basement. Unfortunately, it’s not a complete cut over.

For one, the domain Scopique.com has a lot of baggage linked to it, specifically some email addresses and email hosting. As the control of the DNS records lie with the host of the original site and not the registrar, I’m a bit tied in what I can do with the domain name. I could return the DNS to the registrar and point it back to my home server, but then I’d lose access to the email addresses as I would have to pay for email through the registrar. I don’t want to go through that right now. Ultimately, I want to move registrars to a lower-cost registrar, and then host the email there, but that will take things offline for a while, and again, I don’t want to deal with that right now.

Instead, I have another domain Scopique.online, which I registered with the intention of using it to point to things like Owncast or Pixelfed instances…kind of the “operational” arm of the Scopique Empire. I have yet to make that a reality, but since the domain wasn’t pointing at anything, I am using it to host this site. Scopique.come redirects here, so if you notice that you’re actually reading this post at “blog.scopique.online” don’t be alarmed: dot com now redirects to dot online for the time being.

As far as your reading experience goes, nothing should change. I believe I ironed out all of the public wrinkles so that this site is exactly the same as the original. If you happen to be kicking around and find some issue, please let me know in the comments. Email is kind of broken right now.