====== Why I created my website using DokuWiki ======

I've been sitting on my own name domains for a while. One reason being I sorely regretted losing a few four and five letter domains 20y ago. I make my money via Squads.com so I don't really need a personal brand, but those domains might come in handy someday. Or probably more likely, I will regret it shortly after I give them up. Like empty boxes in the attic, or that sort of thing.

Over the years I had a recurring itch: needing a place to put some content online, that didn't fit with any brand I was involved in. 

Great content should go with an appropriate brand, or on Wikipedia. But there's also the kind of content that is not ready, not newsworthy, but worth sharing online on occasion anyway, for feedback, or to make a point. I always felt I need a place for that. I tried many things in the past decades: a personal blog with many different tools, different social media platforms, public notes, public documents, public drives, private drives, email, and a few other things. None of it made this particular itch go away.

The type of content I am talking about is longer than a mastodon post, shorter and more ephemeral than a book, or a scientific publication. Exactly the stuff that the web was originally designed for, but I never bothered to self-host it. Lazy me.

Another itch, or maybe gripe, is that I don't like what the internet has become. Virtually all online content is owned by Big Tech, and soon it will virtually all be tainted by AI. It's becoming harder and harder to just chill out in your own corner of the world wide web. I have the means and the skills to protest that, so here I am.

==== What is a good website? ====
A good website can be easily read (plain html rocks), and link to relevant sources. Eye candy is irrelevant to me, but it doesn't necessarily make a website bad. Cookie warnings, lead magnets, and ads do. A good website should also be easy to index and search. I also think the web should be for anyone, so it should take less than an hour of low skilled work to put the site live. A good website should also be easy to update.

So let's list the requirements:
  - immune to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification|enshittification]]
  - 100% open source and free content
  - open source platform
  - supports long articles, basic markup, links
  - copyable and maintainable by non-techies
  - hosted outside of the US (see first point)
  - accessible (goes without saying, but apparently it needs to be said more)

DokuWiki is open source, it can be hosted (including the domain) for less than the price of a weeks groceries. Anyone with half a brain (like myself) can use it.

  * It doesn't look fancy, you say? That's fine.
  * It doesn't meet design expectations of modern users, you say? That's fine.
  * It makes me look bad? Don't think so, but bad looks good on me anyway 8-).

The best design is the design that works. I'll use the ugly tool that gets the job done any day and twice on sunday, and that's exactly what has happened here. 90% of the world population can't afford to make a nice looking page, and are then tempted to be online via TikTok, Instagram, or some other unfree petting zoo. It looks slick, but it's dangerous to allow ourselves to slide into the business model of megacorps controlled by evil billionaires. Let's not do that.

I will accept that this domain looks almost as bad as I dress. It's 'cringe' as my kids tell me. You might want to spend a bit more time to polish your online presence. But please take the point that you definitely don't need to think you can't be online without Meta or Google or the likes. You can, and it's even easier and cheaper, as I'm proving right here.

There are much better examples online of course, for example https://leanlogic.online/. 

I think that's a pretty good reason, and I love to be proven wrong also. I'm super curious to see what will happen with this idea :)