We’re Back!
The last newsletter went out back in March, and the last post on this website followed shortly after. That’s four and a half months ago, and it’s reasonable to wonder if this project was abandoned or if there are any plans for new content.
The simple fact is that this site is the product of one guy, and as my own personal project it has to be balanced with all the other things I’m working on. My wife and I started a business back in March, we had four young children home with us over the summer, and my regular job got a lot busier for a few months. As the weather cools here in the Midwestern United States, so too has the intensity of the outside demands. That means I’m looking ahead for this website, picking up where I left off nearly half a year ago.
I have a few changes and a few things planned for the site.
Changes
First, I’m no longer going to post all content through the Newsletter on Substack. Instead, I plan to use it to send out news and updates (like this post) on what’s happening here. Like a real Newsletter. That will keep the things shorter and hopefully more interesting in general.
Second, I’ve removed the category of “Comparisons” from the website. You probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t said anything, because there wasn’t any content in that category yet. The idea behind it was to compare a variety of applications that serve the same purpose to help you decide which one to pick, but I realized that the David vs Goliath section serves this same purpose with a more interesting focus.
Upcoming Content
This site is designed to cater to people who aren’t already deeply familiar with technology; I want to help average households. In light of that, I have a number of tutorials lined up to manage and upgrade a home server, and to better use Plex and other services already covered here. There are about a dozen product reviews and another dozen tutorials lined up, from Calibre (an e-book manager), to a few self-hosted Wiki’s. In terms of content, there’s quite a bit planned.
There are three milestones for BigBad.Tech that I have planned at this point:
The first is to have a David vs Goliath article for the most common Big Tech services to help you decide which alternative(s) would work best for your needs:
- Media (video, photos, music, audiobooks, etc)
- Notetaking
- File sharing
- Backup
- Finances
- E-Books
- Calendars
- Password management
- Household and personal management
For each category, I plan to first write reviews of three or more open-source, self-hosted alternatives.
The second is to finish a series of tutorials. The Home Server Series is effectively finished, but there’s more to consider than just setting up a server. I plan to write a few other short series’:
- Server maintenance
- Backup options
- Security / public access
The third milestone is to have the site begin to bring in some revenue to help justify the work I put into it. While most of the content on the site will remain free forever, you may eventually find some advertisements and paid content here. In keeping with the goal of staying away from Big Tech, I’m not interested in using giant tech companies to finance the website, so you won’t see Google Adsense or other comparable things if ads ever make their way onto the site.
As for paid content, all I have planned for now are ready-made configuration files. If you want to skip some of the headache of figuring things out yourself and just want working files based on what I use, I’ll create a bundle of these with some short instructions that will be available for a small fee. Depending on how much interest there is in the content on the site, you may also see an E-Book available at some point, also for sale.