Moving to wouterds.com: a fresh start

After 15 years of wouterds.be, I've made the switch to wouterds.com. It's not my first domain change though, and I briefly moved to wouterdeschuyter.com (& wouterdeschuyter.be) before, but that never really stuck. Now, with more and more people returning to personal blogs on their own domains, and especially with the rise of Bluesky & the increasingly fragmented social media landscape, I figured it was time for a fresh start.

Over the years, I've blogged on and off, sometimes about technical topics, sometimes more personal. I've deleted a bunch of posts along the way and never really stuck to a regular schedule. This time around, I plan to change that. I'm also setting up a dedicated photography page – while I enjoy sharing pictures, I don't always feel the need to write about them.

The internet is shifting again. More people are reclaiming their own space online, moving away from algorithmic feeds and walled gardens. That's something I've always believed in, and having a domain that feels right is part of that.

I've always liked knowing the ins and outs of hosting my own website. Over the years, I've run it on a Raspberry Pi, then moved to DigitalOcean for a while, but I never found all-in-one cloud solutions appealing. I prefer having full control rather than relying on platforms that abstract everything away. I also just enjoy the process of developing it and getting to know how it's done.

Now the site is back home, on my own mini server. An Asus NUC 14 Pro with a 2TB SSD, 64GB of RAM, and a 22-core 4GHz Intel CPU running Linux Debian 12. Overkill for a simple blog? You bet! But I also host a bunch other websites & side projects on it too, so it definitely earns its keep.

So here's to a new chapter – let's see where this goes!