Category: Uncategorized

No Longer Alone in a Tiny Pod

Up until very recently , I’ve been hosting this blog from a tiny Pikapod1. That worked fine, and I’d recommend it as an option for hosting your own blog for people with some basic technical skills (mostly DNS) – it’s fairly straightforward to set up and there’s few other ways host a blog for $2/month.

Recently the Australian Posters Union decided to offer WordPress hosting to donating members. Since I already donate to them it made perfect sense for me to take them up on the offer.

The Australian Posters Union are a social media co-op that runs the Mastodon and Pixelfed instances I’m on. They’re supported by voluntary donations, and I’m happy to be one of their supporters because the only path I can see that gets us away from a social media environment where we are the product is building a social media environment owned and operated by the communities it serves.

Social media co-ops offering blog hosting as well is a wonderful idea. Blogging is a good complement to micro-blogging, it can provide a space to capture the long form thoughts in a more permanent and easily referenced place, whilst more ephemeral and still developing thoughts can be shared on the Fediverse. Co-ops generally already have the infrastructure to deploy blogs on, and for most small blogs the actual load is very small and easily accommodated.

Meanwhile, it can provide bloggers with a good alternative to either the free but ad supported blog hosts, or the more expensive commercial hosting. This gives us another way to start pushing the web away from the tracker ridden, ad infested space it has become.

  1. Pikapods lets you run preconfigured pods for a variety of web based apps. They’re fairly easy to set up if you’ve got basic technical skills and the supported options include WordPress and Ghost. ↩︎

A Useful Little Workstation

Back in November of 2022, I was just recently migrated off Twitter to Mastodon and was starting to learn about the rest of the Fediverse. Someone called Ari was just starting up a Pixelfed instance for mini-painting called, appropriately, miniature.photography.

My first post on the site was sharing my new portable hobby station. Just a simple MDF kit, but also spray painted to give it extra protection.

An mdf hobby station, fully assembled and painted gray. It looks shiny and new.

I put this together to make it easier to make good use of the rather small amount of hobby time I got (having a young family sure does kill most of your free time). It has its dedicated spot on the shelf which makes setup and pack-up relatively quick and easy.

That station is still with me today, though it now looks a little less immaculate. But it’s served me well so far. One of the minis is even the same in both pictures (for fun, see if you can spot which). I do tend to take a meandering approach to getting figures painted.

The same mdf hobby station, but showing clear evidence of paint spillage and other wear and tear.

Since then, Ari eventually decided that running an instance wasn’t for him. He’s given us all plenty of notice, so I figured it’d be a good idea to migrate some of the stuff I’d posted over there to this blog before the instance goes. You’ll probably see a few more posts where I go back and discuss old projects so I can ensure some of those photos remain available somewhere.

And thank you to Ari. Miniature.photography was my place to share my projects with others for quite a few years, and led to me discovering many other talented painters to follow within the wider hobby corner of Mastodon (frequently simply shortened to Hobbyodon). I could talk more about how wonderful it’s been, for now I’ll share a blog post from someone else whose captured it wonderfully.

A Blog is born

I’m still setting this site up, and I’ll have to come up with a better name, but it exists. It is here.

I’ll be using it to share the miniatures and tabletop stuff I find myself working on. I’ll probably continue to post WIP shots to Pixelfed, and to do more long-form write-ups here.

If you’re interested in hearing more, go ahead and add me to your RSS reader of choice. If you don’t have an RSS reader of choice, consider adopting one for the sake of the indieweb.