Butter, What?! has finally gone live, but what in the heck is Butter, What?!

My friend Brian Moses and I have each been blogging for about ten years or so. He’s been writing on his site, briancmoses.com, and I’ve been writing on my site, patshead.com.

Our blogs aren’t exactly focused on any particular topic, though Brian is often referred to as “the DIY NAS guy.” We just tend to write about things we find interesting, projects we’re working on, or stuff that’s giving us some sort of difficulty.

Even though our blogs aren’t focused on a particular topic, we still sometimes run into ideas that don’t feel appropriate for our own individual blogs. Neither of us write much that would be considered news. We tend to write about things that will have long-term value. I’d like to have a place where I can write about current events.

I’d also like to be able to write about and promote other people’s work. Writing a few paragraphs talking about Jeremy S. Cook’s ClearWalker Strandbeest and embedding his YouTube video on my own blog would feel extremely weird to me. Butter, What?! will be the place for me to post that sort of commentary.

Expect to see collaborations

Brian and I have talked about collaborating on writing projects, but we’ve never managed to figure out a way to do it in a fair and equitable manner. Do I start writing about a topic on patshead.com, then send readers over to briancmoses.com to read the second part? Do we collaborate on a single post and host the content on one of our blogs?

Having a neutral space to store our combined efforts seems like a great choice!

What sort of collaborations should we expect to see?

Brian and I share many of the same hobbies. We enjoy sports cars. We both fly FPV freestyle drones. We enjoy video games. We both build our own custom gaming rigs, and we both run our own custom servers at home.

We both write about the things we enjoy, and we tend to do a good job of pointing people at each other’s content when it is applicable. Some of our content winds up being quite similar. Our experiences and opinions regarding FPV freestyle almost perfectly line up.

Brian's Network Diagram

There are other places where we diverge quite a bit. With our home networks, our solutions tend to be approached from nearly opposite directions.

Brian uses a FreeNAS server with a 10-Gigabit Ethernet subnet, and he hosts his handful of virtual machines on his homelab server.

I have a single KVM server with 20-gigabit Infiniband cards, and I host my NAS in a virtual machine.

Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. Butter, What?! will be a good place to write about the pros and cons of each of our implementations.

Butter, What?! is going to be a community

Since we started blogging, Brian and I have been relying on traffic from Google search. Google has shifted the focus of their search results over the past few years. They tend to promote YouTube videos and huge websites. It isn’t the end of the world for us, but we are both disappointed at how much less traffic we’re receiving these days!

We probably should have started building up a community around our content and interests ten years ago, but we didn’t. Better late than never, right?

Butter, What?! has a Discord server. It has been up and running for almost a year now. We have taken a long time to get the Butter, What?! website up and running.

So far, we have a friendly and welcoming community in Discord, and I feel like it is starting to get pretty chatty in there! Some topics are better represented than others, but we’re working on it.

3dwebe's 3D Printed NAS Case

There’s been a lot of chat lately about Toby Kuivila’s amazing 3D printed NAS case. I am regularly talking about my failures and successes with my new Shapeoko CNC machine. Brian has been keeping us up to date on his recent 3D printing adventures.

Butter, What?! isn’t just about Brian and Pat!

We want to promote other people’s hard work and good content. We want to use our presence on the web to aim eyeballs at the awesome projects other people are working on.

We think Toby’s 3D printed NAS case is a work of art. People ask use about 3D printed computer cases surprisingly often. I don’t think we’ve ever said it would be impossible to create one, but we definitely told people they’d be unlikely to see it happen. Toby not only made it happen, but his execution is absolutely amazing!

We want to promote Toby’s work in any way we can, because we think it is awesome–you should support him on Patreon! If you’re doing something awesome, we want to help you out, too.

If you’re working on something amazing, we want to write about it. We want to make videos about it. We want to show it to the world. If you don’t have a place to write about your work, maybe you could write blog posts here at Butter, What?!

I can’t say that we’ve completely figured out the best ways for us to work with other collaborators, but we definitely want to expand beyond the two of us! If you want to work with us, you may have to help us figure it out!

Why did it take so long to get Butter, What?! up and running?

Why does the blog look so basic? The Discord server has been up for a year, so why is the website so late?

Life happened. We had the idea. We spent a week finding a fun domain name that wasn’t already taken. Not long after that, I bought Brian’s house, Brian bought a different house, and I got sick. All these things took up a lot of time.

We have ideas of how the site should look, but I got sick of waiting to work on a theme for our static site generator. I set up a new Jekyll site, left the default theme, and started writing this blog post!

The look and feel can come later. Neither of us are good at that stuff. It is much easier to sit down and write 1,500 words–especially if I don’t have to do hours of research ahead of time!

Do you think we’re off to a good start?

I know this is literally the first blog post, and there isn’t any other content on the site. I also know that Google won’t index this immediately. That means there’s a good chance that no one is going to see this before a few more posts show up on the blog.

Do you think we’re on the right track? Are you already a regular reader at patshead.com or briancmoses.com? Do you have something in mind that we need to collaborate on right away? Are we off to a good start?!

Leave a comment. Stop by our Discord server and hang out with the rest of our community. Let us know what you think!