My two year weblogging anniversary is coming up, April 2nd. Two years ago on that day, I signed up for a Manila account at burningbird.manilasites.com, though I took a hiatus in the middle of the year due to my divorce and subsequent move to San Francisco. Some of the entries have been deleted but some are still there in October and November.
I know what I want on my anniversary: I want a server of my own. I want a dedicated Linux box with loads of space and great bandwidth, maintained by a reliable ISP. I want to load it up with Movable Type and software for managing our photos and our music, and Tomcat for Java applications as well as Python and Perl and PHP.
I want to offer my server as home for my favorite webloggers, and also want to provide a place for people to post if something has gone wrong with their server — sort of a community emergency bulletin board weblog so to speak.
I want to finish the Java-based applications I was building but had to stop hosting because I lost my server late last year. Then the next time I interview for a company I want to work at, and I start to freeze up at the questions because I’m tense and a bit scared about finding a job, I can point to the applications and say “See. That’s what I’ve done. That’s what I’m capable of.” They still might not hire me, but at least I won’t be embarrassed.
We can share Movable Type libraries, and when the next release is out, and we’ve tested the release, I can upgrade us all at once. Quick and easy. And there’s so much great open source, free software for doing anything we can want available. All we need is space, and the ability to install the software.
Hosting Matters is very cool, and they were very responsive to my email spam problem. But I want a server of my own. That’s what I want.
