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A colophon is a page or section (typically in a footer) of a site that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies, and often published on personal sites at a top level /colophon page. —IndieWeb/colophon.

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After a multi-months-long experiment in rolling my own site using Google Gemini’s AI on my own Raspberry Pi located here in my home workspace, I decided to move things over to Notion as the foundation for things. The primary purpose was to simplify creation and maintenance and to keep things from becoming too complex, as I am far from being a proficient practitioner of PHP (I personally prefer scripting in Python or Google Apps Script). It also allows me to eliminate the monthly fees for Google AI Pro and keep my data from being spread out across multiple endpoints (Google, OneDrive, iCloud, and the Raspberry Pi). I’ve migrated most of the things I would save in those endpoints to Notion, and saved some money every month in the process.

http(s)://swb72.us redirects to https://swb72.notion.site via Cloudflare so that I don’t have to pay extra for Notion to host the domain. Additional redirects exist via Cloudflare for common slashpage endpoints where necessary, like /about (Notion doesn’t allow using it as an endpoint because it’s reserved) redirecting to /about-me, /hello redirecting to /contact, &c.

That said, I still use the Raspberry Pi as a data endpoint for applications that generate the largest amounts of data and for which keeping it in Notion would be impractical (Overland, for example, generates up to 86,400 location points a day, plus trips and visits). The Pi is a version 5, with 8 GiB RAM and an NVMe hat hosting a 512 GB SSD, which I’ll swap out for larger sizes as I need to. The PCI-to-NVMe hat provides far more speed and long-term stability for the system than using an external USB drive (which can sometimes draw too much power) or the built-in MicroSD slot (SD was never designed for the kind of read/write operation needed for use as a main system disk).

I use Apache CouchDB as the database because the records are sent and received as ordinary JSON, and I can create views to extract the bits that I want for a particular purpose. I also maintain an email service on it (dovecot/postfix using maildir, with Mailgun for the rare outgoing email) and apache2 to host various scripts that receive and process data.

I use Tailscale on all of my devices to minimize the number and type of ports that have to be left open to the Internet on my home network. Dynamic DNS is handled via ddns with a plug-in for Cloudflare.