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David Rutland would like to apologise in advance for the supernatural puns contained herein – but it was written in the run-up to Halloween.

OUR EXPERT David Rutland is a tinkerer and a dilettante. He buys domains on a whim and runs them from a Raspberry Pi behind the couch..

T he internet is a bleak place in the third decade of the 21st century. Away from the walledgarden shouting matches and ego-stroking of the social media sites, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the bulk of the web is an endless desert of SEO optimised buying guides, VPN affiliate sites and filth.

Well, that’s our experience of it anyway. Gone are the days of stumbling around from site to site, following links from personal blogs to whatever whimsical sites the authors care to link to. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Break away from the usual routine and welltrodden paths, and you’ll find that there are still a few pockets of genuine authentic content, written by authors who want to document their lives without plastering it across Facebook for a handful of Likes, or document their hobbies and passions without selling out to a huge media conglomerate (hey, that’s us!–ED).

Yes folks, independent blogging is back with a vengeance, and with your shiny new VPS, you can be a part of it too! Imagine the delight of a total stranger as they stumble across your blog and are sucked down into your thoughts, musings and oh-so-witty take on life, politics, technology and pets.

Picture their glee as, having bookmarked your words of wisdom and shared it with their friends, they move on to yet more discoveries through your expertly curated set of links to other blogs worth their time.

The Ghost Marketplace is where you go if you want to get new themes to change the look of your blog. We found it to be an excellent opportunity for procrastination.

So what is a blog? You know damn well what a blog is. The correct question is, “How do I choose what blogging software to use?” with the possible additional question, “How do I set it up?” We’ll address both now.

Down at the most basic level, your blog can be a simple text document written in nano, mousepad, kate or whatever. You can put it in the root of your VPS and update it by simply adding more text to the top. It works, it’s simple, it’s super-quick and it’s an almost no-knowledge of way of getting your thoughts out into the world. The downside is that a text file is limited to text only. No images, no links, and your blog is unlikely to be discovered by accident or happenstance.

The next possibility is to do it in HTML by hand, with the added option of using a Static Site Generator (see Roundup LXF282) such as Jekyll to make creation and updates a walk in the park. But SSGs are last year’s hot topic, and while they hold a treasured place in the hearts of everyone at Linux Format, it seems like a severe underuse of the resources of our mighty VPS.