OwenWiki: Owen Mellema's Personal Encyclopedia

Congratulations! Assuming you typed the URL for this webpage into your browser's search bar, you have successfully spelled both the words “Owen” and “Mellema”! ¹⁾

See also main article: Who is Owen? and Resume

Hi! I am Owen. I really like computers. I like computers so much that I studied computers in college, and at work I work on computers. When I am not tinkering with computers, I will usually be gaming or reading.

My inspiration for creating this website was this video by Luke Smith , a technology personality whose opinions (and memes) I agree with quite a bit ²⁾. Here's my reasons:

• Having a personal webserver means I am not reliant on any company's revenue structure to share my life. I am increasingly critical of Big Tech's influence on society. I believe that, for example, social media is actively making people's lives worse, causing them to become more self-conscious, depressed, angry, and all around more miserable versions of themselves.
• I have the freedom to format my information in the way that I see fit to do so.
• It serves as a single resource people can go to to get information about me. Rather than information being scattered across Facebook, GitHub, Instagram, etc, all of the important stuff can be hosted right here, with appropriate links if necessary.
• It is an opportunity to get better at various network-related IT stuff.
• And, honestly, it isn't very expensive. This entire thing costs me ~$5.50 a month.

Although my old webpage is quite nice, I found that some of the tasks I wanted to accomplish were either extremely inconvenient or impossible in pure HTML. Firstly, one of my projects, ArchEvo, was becoming absurdly complex, and having a branching documentation structure seemed like the only way to sanely document what I was doing. Secondly, using this wiki structure makes it a lot easier to make changes to webpages. Previously, I would have needed to make an edit locally and upload the file via FTP. This is a bit of a chore, and I would end up putting off uploading. Finally, the presence of an ACL makes it easy to determine who gets to see what.

Also, wikis are awesome.

Just me

This website uses a piece of software called Dokuwiki . Dokuwiki is, as the name implies, a wiki software. I chose Dokuwiki because it is lightweight, and, in my opinion, lightweight webpages are best.

The domain name owenmellema.com was only $8.49 a year, so I snagged in on Epik. The server itself is a VPS, and it is hosted by Vultr . The server is a Cloud Compute instance, and is in Atlanta, Georgia.