Yet another website

Look it's me, John "Durok" Champion, with a new platform to shout from!

I'm not sure what exactly drives me to make new websites all the time. I guess its just a fun form of procrastination for me. I could pretend that I'm creating useful websites and impacting the internet at large, but I'm not. Most of them are made to be looked at once or twice by a handful of people and then forgotten. My servers are riddled with long dead blogs of TTRPG campaigns, various portfolio sites, and a few personal wikis mixed in for good measure. I don't regret the time I spent making them though. They achieved their goals: distracting me from some other more boring project while also expanding my knowledge and skills. Plus, some of my websites are actually useful; or are attempting to be at least. For instance, the Timescape Wiki, which is probably one of my most trafficked websites to date. More on that in the future though.

Now, when I say I'm making websites, "make" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'm not exactly writing them from scratch. Usually I'm leveraging open source frameworks/software/CDNs like Angular, Grav, Wordpress, MediaWiki, or in the case of this site: Ghost. At this point I think the only website I've written 100% of the code for (that is still accessible) is Choob.xyz—and that's just a randomized gif display. Not much of a website!

Why create this website?

Well... I sort of needed it? Not all of this of course, but I at least needed a landing page and a contact page for some not-quite-legal reasons for my LLC I use for my contract work. So there was some motivation beyond just procrastinating other projects.

However, given the increasing enshittification of the internet and fall of Social Media platforms, I thought I might as well try to provide an alternative way for people to keep up to date with what I'm up to. A blog/newsletter essentially (I'm not really sure what the difference is). So I looked into some various different open source CDNs that were built around doing just that, because I always want to be trying out new things, and eventually settled on Ghost. It's perhaps a bit too heavy handed for what I need it for—I don't need various different tiers of paid subscribers for instance (and if I do want that in the future, I'll just use Patreon again and let them handle the taxes). But, it seemed promising for at least managing subscriptions/email lists and pushing written content, which is all I really require.

So here we are again. Back in the early days of the internet where people make personal blogs and subscribe to email mailing lists. It only took us a few decades, a dozen billionaires, and a heaping scoop of soulless AI generated vomit.

What exactly is going to be posted here?

Well. Probably a bit of everything? Most of my online following comes from the TTRPG community, so there will certainly be a lot of content related to MCDM, Draw Steel, D&D, and a dash of community management. But, I'm also a software developer so there may be some random tech related things sprinkled in, discussions of previous projects, current projects, who knows!

I do have a few posts planned already. The first being my recommendations for anyone starting their own public Discord server; since that's a common thing I'm asked. After that I'll be talking about the Timescape Wiki project since I want to shout out all of the amazing community members who have been working on it and some of the technical hurdles.

The future is uncertain

I'll be blunt, I am notoriously bad at following through with these types of things (blogs/content creation) as my ADHD interests drag me in different directions all the time. Plus, life happens! My hope is that with this being a catch-all for everything I'm doing, it will at least have a longer shelf life than my previous attempts that were more narrow scoped.

So with that out of the way... Welcome to Champion Endeavors!