DOU.BET —
This site controls: a URL Shortener, mail hosting, FTP, Jabber, and website analytics and statistics gathering services…
URL Shortener
URL shorteners are really cool. They take annoyingly long URL’s and make them into small URL’s. Now that Google announced that it is discontinuing its URL shortening service, demand for new URL Shortening Services will grow. Thankfully, I have already built mine!
e-Mail
I have a personal email server running that uses unnecessarily high encryption that can be used with any modern web client. I also have a web client that my users can log into. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well and haven’t had enough free time to figure it out.
FTP
I also have a FTP server running on this domain. I use FileZilla which is for Windows only, but I really like the FileZilla client so much that it just works for me. It really doesn’t have a purpose with the exception of that if for some reason someone needed to send me a file programmatically, they could use this. I also have a web ftp client that works with many different types of FTP solutions.
Openfire – Chat/Video Chat – DEAD
Ignite Realtime is an open source jabber server with many plugins to support a wide variety of protocols and even video conferencing. I built this so I could securely chat with anyone without having a need to have their email address or phone number. I use a number of items in conjunction with this service including InVerse which is a full screen web chat client and as a support module for this blog (lower left hand) and my main page (lower right).
Web Analytics
If you do not already know, every website you visit tracks you. Every click, every like, every image, every download, even mouse movements. I do not use this information maliciously, it is really to gather from where are people getting to my blog and if they were referred here (i.e. link from Facebook) or not. I use Matamo, a free open source tool to achieve this.
Cloud
Nextcloud is by far the best personal cloud storage solution out there. It is free, open sourced, robust, and even GDPR compliant. I use it to share files with my friends and family. There are two fantastic apps embedded in the cloud that are worth mentioning: Collabora and Talk. Collabora is a real time, multi-user document editor that has full support for Microsoft documents (i.e. .docx, .xlsx, etc.). Talk is a full blown video conferencing app that not only let’s users video chat each other, but also has the capability to do public calls if you need to meet with an outside source. It is much better than Openfire imo.
Surveys
This one is new for me and I don’t have a great understanding of how it works yet, but short story, I can create polls and surveys using a self hosted instance of LimeSurvey. I keep the data where as someone like SurveyMonkey will mine all the data at your end users expense.
Photo Host
A while back, I wanted an easy way to share just photos with people. I had a hard time finding something that would work for me and lot’s of options did not work. Finally, I found Chevereto. They are fairly new but pack a lot of features into their free version which you can also build, download, and host yourself. Lot’s of the photos on this page are actually hosted here. I did have a problem in April of 2018 where I had someone upload hundreds of photos so I had to make the site “Registered view only”. So, you can make an account to view and upload if you’d like.
Radio
Icecast is a free and open source software that simply put creates an internet radio station. I basically play music using MediaMonkey and the EdCast plugin streams the music out to the world. There are two version of the website: Alpha and Basic. Alpha is only for computers as it would be terribly slow on a phone that has an interactive background based on what music is playing and album art. Basic only has the player and information about what song is currently playing. I hope to be able to add lyrics in the future. In the meantime, have a listen!
Peertube
Peertube is a YouTube alternative that is decentralized: meaning that videos can be hosted on hundreds of servers but be able to be watched from any one server. This is purely experimental and my “pod” does not allow new users. Check it out. Warning, it is really a hodge podge of random videos, mostly in French because the creator is from France!
Diaspora*
Diaspora* is a federated, decentralized social network consisting of “The Federation”: Mastadon, Hubzilla, diaspora*, red, and GNU social. I have made my own pod and as of 8/16/2018, has 116 users. The purpose is to have alternatives to Twitter and Facebook to house your own data, share what you want with whom you want that is completely under your control.
searX
searX is a privacy-respecting, open source search engine like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo but it does not track or store any information that you search within it and you can host it yourself. You can even make it your default search provider!
Mastodon – DEAD
Mastodon was created to be almost exactly like Twitter with a few exceptions: federated, decentralized, each instance can have their own rules, no ads, no tracking, 500 character limit (although some can have up to 10,000). This is really an experiment to see what/who else is out on the internet in conjunction (warning, there are a lot of weird people on there, AKA very NSFW) with diaspora* above and also because I can! 😀
Plex
Plex is Freemium software (you have to have an account with them, and basically all features are free except some over-the-top premium features like DVR, Tidal, etc.) that you can install on your computer that organizes your music, tv shows, and movies all into a seamless, well put together interface, and let’s you access it from anywhere in the world. I have approximately 2TB of videos and music that I can take with me using Plex. One of the coolest things is that if you sign up, you can Share your libraries with your friends and have all kinds of content to listen/watch.