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the future of elaboraet

yesterday, i acquired a new domain for elaboraet, elaboraet.net.

i almost got it on an impulse because it looked so nice to have a dedicated domain to elaboraet again. the hope is that this provides a new, standalone space for any future projects that i want to put under the elaboret name, including my writing.

another domain i acquired is enargeia.net with my partner for, among many other things, a soon-to-be wiki for a reimagined destiny universe. visit soon :)

elaboraet.net

however, with elaboraet.net in mind, i'm currently not sure how i will split content between my neocities instance and the now-official .net instance.

before i continue, i will provide some context about another thought i'm having simultaneously.

that is to say, i've grown more concerned recently about posting my art (such as the ones you see in the art section on this website) on websites like instagram or other large sprawling social media platforms.

why? a lot of these websites' owners, such as meta, have admitted either directly or indirectly to scraping user-posted content to feed their AI models. while you can possibly argue about content scrapers being inevitable and inescapable in the end, i want to make any kind of effort to avoid having my creative outputs fed into a model.

one solution, i thought, was to post my art a platform i had more control over to, therefore, have more control over the files i post. while not a full solution, this solves the direct threat of a greedy company scraping my content for their own interests.

hence, this line of thinking generates two paths forward:

the first, i may repurpose my neocities instance as an art platform for myself (keeping the current look and feel, perhaps widening the page for better viewing) and continue elaboraet in its journal form on blog.elaboraet.net or something similar (that domain does not yet have any content.)

the second and less ideal, i may replace my neocities instance entirely with elaboraet.net. having done this in the past when i experimented with a .com domain, i don't think this will be as productive.

or maybe some third idea will come about soon when i'm less busy. no idea!

possible blogging software

as of current, i am looking at a few blogging software options alongside the idea to just keep writing my own HTML, which can honestly be a lot more fun sometimes. regardless:

a blog-repurposed dokuwiki instance is one of the more possible options i'm looking at. since it is a wiki software at heart, i imagine being able to easily link to different internal topics, pages, whatever without too much intermediary work (as in copying a template HTML file, editing its contents, writing the links manually, not worrying about file renames) while also having a centralized media management system of some kind.

besides being nearly as fast as a static website, another distinct advantage to dokuwiki is its database-less operation: every post is a text file. while discussions and commenting functionality is a little limited, i imagine deeper configuration (beyond my cursory testing) will let me build something more robust.

something else i've looked at, and have experience with, is dotclear. it is a little similar in age to dokuwiki, except in my testing i was not able to get its post editor or page editor to function due to PHP errors i could not resolve. this was under a clean debian instance with dependencies installed.

another option is wordpress. i have a lot of history with wordpress, and, by this point in time, many of the "classic" themes i used to use (like "tarski") are now totally obsolete and do not function at all with the latest versions. keeping an old version for the purpose of a theme may pose security issues.

i guess my aim is to maintain a quaint look to my websites without compromising heavily on security. this is why i've stuck with a static, manually written HTML website for so long because of the control i have over its looks and inherent security (it is a static page with nothing to necessarily "hack.")

of course, i suppose i can also upgrade my neocities account to use a custom domain, but i'd like to avoid paying for any more subscriptions at the moment :)

2024-11-16