Welcome to towk2.me!

Written on 01/03/2025 by David J. Allen

Welcome to towk2.me! This is my personal website that I am working on to get up and running with a few handy services. Everything is integrated together using Docker Compose, but I plan to convert this deployment over to using Kubernetes and move to some dedicated hardware at some point. I'm still making changes so don't be too surprised if something changes suddenly or just looks completely off.

Why Create this Site with Services?

The whole point of creating this site is to understand how to build a modern site using modern web tech. I've built web sites before using plain HTML, Javascript, CSS, PHP, etc. along with a couple of simple JS libraries like JQuery back in the day. I remember how tedious it was to build sites back then even for something so simple and static, but some of that pain may have just been from inexperience. Things have changed a lot since then and I'm definitely a much better developer nowadays. So, I figured it would be nice to up my game and try out using new stuff.

As far as the services go, I wanted to get better at creating deployment recipes and scaling them up, while also show casing some open-source alternatives to popular social media like Facebook and Twitter. It's something I wanted to do for a long time and it just so happens that doing this coincides with my professional work.

Frontend Development

The main frontend is created primarily using ReactJS, NextJS, and Tailwind CSS. It is then built and containerized with Docker+Compose.

docker compose -f base.yml up

Using the base.yml recipe will only start the frontend without any of the other additional services found on the site.

Available Services

There are several services that are being hosting alongside of the frontend that can be found on the Apps page. Services can be brought up alongside the fronted using the following:

docker compose \
        -f services/base.yml \
        -f services/ldap.yml \
        -f services/storage.yml \
        -f services/openproject.yml \
        -f services/forgejo.yml \
        -f services/mattermost.yml \
        -f services/mastodon.yml \
        -f services/peertube.yml \
        -f services/nextcloud.yml \
        -f services/owncast.yml \
        -f services/stalwart.yml \
        -f services/jellyfin.yml \
        up

Services can be added and removed as desired, but the base.yml and storage.yml services are usually required for the other services to run at minimum.

Some other things to check out

I have a couple of other things to check out on the site too! These can be found by clicking on the "Apps" button in the header bar at the top, but I'm going to highlight a couple that I use often here:

That's all for now!