Say, you have your own little website, which you made as a hobby. And say you wrote a PhD thesis in LaTeX. Would it not be nice to also publish it on LaTeX? How hard can it be?
In the beginning there was the physical book. The first half of my PhD, I wrote what I did in that physical notebooks. But, as the world is moving to more transparent science, Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) are becoming the norm. After some struggling in OneNote, I have now settled for Obsidian.
In a previous post, I discussed why you would want to use Obsidian as an electronic lab notebook (ELN). Just to quickly recap: Obsidian is flexible, (pretty) open, and free to use. In this post, I will guide you through the practical steps of setting up Obsidian for effective use as an ELN. First, I will explain broadly how everything sticks together, followed by a more in-depth exploration of the configuration details at the end of the post.
When I first started using Dokuwiki, i just put random notes there, not intending to really use it for much more than a fun hobby project. But it has now grown to a personal knowledge base with random facts, protocols, and information about techniques. I thought it would be useful for myself to write down what I've learned, and thought I could share it with others as well.
When I first started to make a little website for myself as a hobby, I made it in Hugo, using the Cupper theme. But I've switched to Dokwiki now, and I feel much more at home.
So, you have finished the sciency bits of you PhD degree, that is great. But now, the really awful part starts - actually compressing all of that into a cohesive document, your thesis. In this little post, the actual rewriting I will not discuss, although this is a real challenge1). Instead I will discuss formatting.
Over time, my self-hosting stuff has out-grown my good old Raspberry Pi 3B. At home I have Intel NUC (a mini PC), which is running Proxmox (for heavy stuff), a QNAP NAS (for storing data) and a Raspberry Pi 4 (for fun). The old Raspberry Pi 3 is currently enjoying its retirement. I also have 3 active VPS'es running: one in the US (free tier Google cloud), and two tiny cheap ones in the Netherlands and the UK.
By (mildly) popular demand, I will briefly list the self-hosting stuff I use (and don't use) and why. I will not discuss how to set up these things, I think you can find that out elsewhere on the web, but I will rather explain why I use what. I will list my self-hosted services from 1 downward in order of how dependent I am on them, just to give you an idea.