💾 Archived View for dreamcloud.academy › bterry › 2021-10-17-storyofdreamcloudacademy.gmi captured on 2021-11-30 at 20:18:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Dreamcloud Academy started as a combination of some frustrations with DropBox and the discovery of ownCloud (an open source, self-hostable alternative), mixed in with a general interest in learning more about running a Linux server and working with internet tech and hosting my own site, among other things. The site was born back on March 17th, 2016. In the first week, after getting a simple static site up, I fiddled around with Let's Encrypt, then on to a variety of small issues getting ownCloud working smoothly. I also set up the phpBB Bulletin Board/Forum software.
Around this time, I thought I'd see if I could get some friends involved. One large group of my friends are involved in pretty regular role-playing (of the Dungeons & Dragons variety, though with many game systems), and so I thought I'd upload some files we tend to need to reference up to a shared folder in the ownCloud. People could also use the phpBB. I even got a script going, so that folks could upload HTML into a "www" folder in ownCloud, and it would dump onto the web for them in a folder based on their user name. I was feeling pretty good about it. Overall, I can't say my friends took to it as completely as I'd have liked, but over time they did begin to use the shared "Dreamcloud Library" more and more, and that was cool. Another thing I half-did during this time is make some static sites to chronicle some of the RPG campaigns I personally GMed. They are still around in a currently sloppy form on the server if you search hard enough. I'll have to tidy it up.
The next big thing to happen with the server is that I began to run out of space. Also... I was not so diligent at keeping ownCloud up to date, and things had changed. So, in November of 2019 I backed up and rebuilt the whole thing. The phpBB was dropped (only ever had a dozen or 2 posts), I migrated from ownCloud to Nextcloud, I upped my disk space from 256 GB to 8 TB, and I went from Ubuntu to Debian. This also was when the front page went to being a MediaWiki instance. Basically, the server is Debian with this package called FreedomBox installed (which was originally meant for people to create their own web services on small Raspberry Pi style computers), and Nextcloud on the side.
The latest thing, as you might guess, is that I've added a Gemini server to the mix. I'm just playing around. Currently the Gemini server actually is running on my Windows PC, but it has access to my Nextcloud shares and I'm able to tie things together in that manner.
So yeah, that's what you're dealing with! Just some guy messing around with the internet who has a server. And now you know the story of Dreamcloud Academy. May it lead to more interesting things!