This website runs on a Samsung Galaxy S9

It's my most Confabulator project yet.

I’ve always been excited about simple web publishing. My favorite example of this was back when Dropbox had a public folder. I could put a one-page website in my Dropbox folder, get the public URL, and GoDaddy would let me map a domain to that one-page file. It wasn’t professional, but it was powerful.

Similarly, GitHub Pages has been a great place for me to get back into putting stuff on the internet. It’s a Git repository with all my posts as markdown text files and some custom HTML and CSS. It makes web publishing accessible while keeping the technology side manageable. Along with a reasonable $4/month plan, I’ve been very happy with it.

For as nice as GitHub Pages has been, my technology journey is taking me in a different direction. And today I have big news for Confabulator. I’ve moved off of GitHub Pages and onto the Samsung Galaxy S9 on the shelf next to my desk! The details of how I did that are in my companion piece How to set up an Android web server.

I’m very excited! It’s probably the most Confabulator project ever, tying together themes of upcycling, owning my digital life, and a smaller approach to the internet.

I’ve wanted to repurpose a smartphone into a server for years. I figured an ARM processor in a smartphone was not too different from a Raspberry Pi. When I couldn’t find a compatible version of Linux for my old phones, much less an alternative version of Android for most of them, I was appalled. And it finally hit me how much of our tech is disposable.

I’m glad I found something to do with this Galaxy S9, but it’s far from an ideal device. It turns out my variant of Galaxy S9 can’t be unlocked. That means I can’t install another operating system. No LineageOS. No /e/OS/. And no hope to switch to Linux down the road and reclaim the RAM wasted on the Android UI. Oh well. A future garbage mindset means making the best of what I have.

It’s fun to tell my friends outside of IT that I’m running a website on an old phone because it immediately clicks for them. Everybody browses the internet. Everybody has an old phone. And they have their pre-conceptions about those things: Websites are technical and complicated, their old phone was slow and needed to be replaced. Even if a website is technical and complicated for them, and their phone really did need to be replaced, seeing a website running on a phone is intriguing.

It’s alt-futuristic because it conjures possibilities that are radically different from what we expect from our consumer technology. Here’s a junky old Android phone putting my stuff on the internet just the same as anybody else.

Now that I own the server, it opens the door for future enhancements. Things like adding pagination to the category pages, or even site search. I could use server logs to get page view data without compromising your privacy, since right now I have no idea if anyone visits the site. I’d also like to display some server info and maybe battery percentage like Low Tech Magazine’s solar-powered Raspberry Pi server.

In the mean time, I will luxuriate in a successful project, and a demonstration of turning future garbage into useful infrastructure.