Dogsolitude_uk is the digital project name used by Gavin Holmes. He is a web developer, sometime-electronic music producer and a practising Buddhist based in the East of England.
Gav likes Maneki Nekos, chocolate, alcohol-free beer and a bunch of other things. He has an abiding love of nature, art, mathematics and philosophy, and interests in the nature of consciousness and technology and how they interact.
He is an advocate for a simpler, calmer way of life.
This is his personal website.
Advertising, revenue and expenses
At time of writing (23rd April 2023) I do not monetise this blog. Anything I recommend on here is something I actually, genuinely use in real life and would recommend to a friend if we were discussing things over a coffee.
I host this site on an AWS EC2 server, running a t3a.small. It’s cheap, but costs me about £10 a month to run, and allows me to have full control of the codebase, deployments, domain name registration and SSL certificates all in one place. If the traffic to this site increases, then the EC2 does more work and I have to pay it more, so if we get to that point then I may consider some Google Ads or something.
Hosting
I host this site on an AWS EC2, t3a.small running a basic WordPress AMI from Bitnami. Cheating? Maybe… I mean I could build a box in the corner of my room, install a distro and LAMP on it and sort it out by hand, but this site is a spare-time thing.
Statement on AI
All of the content on this site is written by me, not an AI. I write here because I enjoy it, and whereas I’d probably be more productive using AI to help, it sucks all the fun out of blogging.
Images are a bit different though: one image I used of a cat was generated by Bing as I couldn’t find a suitable pic on Pixabay. At time of writing (June 2024) AI-generated images still have that AI-generated “look”, and it all feels a bit… Soulless.
So for images, where possible I’ll take them myself, if not, I’ll poke round Pixabay or shutterstock for something suitable!