Ok, so I have a domain and a blog. Now what? I poked around the Internet and came up with a few ideas:

• Setup a Mail server. Every domain needs mail right?
• Setup Google Analytics for Web Traffic analysis.
• Setup OpenVPN. Whenever I’m remote, I could connect to this to encrypt my connection, and access services on my home network without the need for SSH tunnels.
• Build custom services, primarily with myself in mind, but I’d like the challenge of building something that could be used by others as well. Possibly some sort of open source project. This involves some of my other plans to build up a CI/CD environment to build, test, and deploy web applications. With Kubernetes!
• I’ve seen some suggestions of creating a personal landing page which could be a organized list of common bookmarks in a pleasing format. This sounds interesting, and something I might implement to standardize my experience across platforms and browsers. Of course this should be protected with authentication. This could even be built and managed by the CI/CD solution mentioned above, and give me some experience with some new technologies I’ve been wanting to try out.
• Build a home page. Right now ericpark.dev redirects to WordPress. Maybe something else will live here eventually.
• Run my own Password Manager service. Think LastPass, but on my own hardware.
• Run my own URL shortening service. An interesting idea.
• Build my own private cloud, something analogous to Dropbox but on my own hardware.
• Build a contact server. Instead of keeping all of my contacts in Google I could move them to my own LDAP solution. I’d have to see how well I could integrate this into my phone if I really wanted to replace Google. I could also use this for authentication to my own apps.
• Set up URLs to redirect to social media accounts. This is simply kind of a branding thing. Really not all that useful for my personal domain, but easy enough to configure.
• Setup a web proxy. I could see doing this for fun. It’s pretty far down the list though.

Some of these ideas are certainly more tin-foil hat than others, but in this day-in-age where everyone is trying to profit off our data. The more I could move onto my own services the better. For the most part, I see this as an opportunity to implement solutions I wouldn’t have before. Essentially replacing many cloud solutions that many of us take for granted everyday. It certainly gives me something to do!