Why?

Why did I choose the current domain name?

I chose the current name because it seems to represent my thoughts and how I do things on here. My thoughts are always scattered all over the place, and when I do settle on an idea, I just sort of splatter it all over the place. That’s how I came up with ScatterSplatter.net. I had been wanting to switch to a net domain for some time now. I was never completely happy with the 26-year-old domain because of the .org top-level domains. The second one I used just felt too wordy.

Why do I keep this website up?

Why do I keep this site up? The simple answer to this question is because I can. It doesn’t get any simpler or straightforward than that. It’s a learning tool for me sometimes, and other times it’s just an outlet. I also use it to store ideas at times for a later date.

I have always found personal pages more interesting than the bigger commercial ones. Maybe that’s a product of getting onto the internet in the mid-1990s. They’re there because someone wanted to share something and not for monetization purposes, worded in a way to influence SEO. If only I could smash this last part into those who are going to email me to increase my rankings or sales. I have no sales here and don’t care about rankings. If someone finds it interesting, then that’s great. If not, then I hope they find something interesting elsewhere.

Why not just use social media to share my thoughts and ideas?

Why don’t I just use social media to share my ideas? That’s easy too. I control this. I can move it and host it anywhere I want. I have multiple backups, so if my host decides they don’t like me or they shut it down today, it’s no big problem. I can easily find a new host and untar the static files or regenerate them from Hugo and upload them to a new host faster than the DNS would propagate. It’s the same Nginx with the fact that any host can shut down at any time. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and whatever else is popular now can and will fade. Eventually, they will all be gone. For my setup here, as long as I can have a place to host it, I can take it anywhere. Hell, it’s even platform-agnostic. I do not see any reason why I would stop using FreeBSD, but I could run it on any web server that runs on any operating system. Other than the learning curve and a few stupid errors I made, I switched from Nginx to Caddy recently. Had it not been a spur-of-the-moment decision, I could have set up a temporary test VPS and then had only seconds of downtime.

There’s no login required to read anything I have posted here. There’s no walled garden. Hell, there’s nothing to log into through https at all on this domain. I have nothing here that you could register for. In the past, it was available when I used WordPress, but that’s long gone, and the database with all the data has long since been deleted.

There’s no algorithm to show you the most controversial post to get you to view more ads and spend more time here. If you see something interesting, then simply read it, or you could email me if you wanted to say something. Everything is available by date in the archives.

Another reason I will always self-host it is that there is no censorship. Well, technically there is censorship in the sense that hosting providers have terms that you have to follow. I can take my files anywhere I want to take them this way. Over the years, I have probably been through ten to twelve different hosts. I’ve moved relatively easily between them, moving from shared hosting to Linux VPS to eventually FreeBSD on various VPS or dedicated servers. I’ve been on FreeBSD for ten plus years now. The server software has gone from Apache to Nginx to Caddy, simply because I wanted to try something new.

If you rely on social media, they’re definitely censoring, and the whole “fact-checking” thing they’re pushing now is something I am really just not that sure about. It’s a slippery slope for them to have the ability to push their agenda.

My ideas and thoughts change over time, and that shows if one looks at the topics I’ve posted about in the past. Originally, it was a lot of stuff related to the weather. Don’t get me wrong, weather is still something that deeply interests me. Currently, the majority of my posts are fitness-related. Mainly because I am not a fat fuck anymore and have found that I enjoy CrossFit-style workouts and have always enjoyed lifting, but didn’t have the means to do it until we started CrossFit, and then slowly set up our home gym. Really, I hope it may inspire other people to take the steps to improve their lives.

Another thing that I occasionally like to post is reviews when something strikes me as something worth reviewing. Maybe someone could find it useful if they stumbled upon it.

A big part of why I do this is the fact that it’s my place to experiment and try new things out. If it does happen to break, it’s not a huge deal as long as I learn something by fixing it.

Why do use a dark color scheme?

Because that type of color scheme has always been easier on my eyes. Being visually impaired, I used a CCTV to enlarge text in school, and that would be set to negative contrast too. I use Dark Reader on my browser for everything. Dark text on a light background hurts my eyes.

Some day I will create a light color scheme for this site. I have started it but never finished it.