OwenWiki

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====== 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"! (( Not to mention the ever-so-important "www" and "com"! ))

===== Things that you can find here =====
^ Category   ^ Topic                  ^ Featured Article                  ^
| Technology | [[projects:Projects]]  | [[projects:archevo:ArchEvo]]    |
| | Opinions  | [[technology:opinions:abiasedguidetounittests | A Biased Guide to Unit Tests ]]|

===== About Owen =====
// See also main article: [[ misc:whoisowen | Who is Owen? ]] and [[https://old.owenmellema.com/content/resume.pdf | 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. 

===== About this website =====

==== Why have a website? ====

My inspiration for creating this website was [[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdKZVIGRAKQ | this video by Luke Smith ]], a technology personality whose opinions (and memes) I agree with quite a bit (( Even though he would probably frown on me having a website with JavaScript -- but, in my defense, it is FOSS! )). 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.

==== Why a wiki? ====

Although my [[https://www.old.owenmellema.com|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, [[ projects:archevo: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.

==== Who can make changes? ====
Just me 8-)

==== Technical Details ====

This website uses a piece of software called [[ https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki | 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 [[https://www.epik.com | Epik]]. The server itself is a VPS, and it is hosted by [[ https://www.vultr.com/ | Vultr ]]. The server is a Cloud Compute instance, and is in Atlanta, Georgia.