Introducing someone to web servers, Linux, and hosting a website can be difficult if they aren’t naturally inclined to learn about this sort of thing. Let’s face it, tech can absolutely be boring to someone. “Someone”, in this case, refers to my 9 year old daughter.
She’s the type of person that would rather play pretend, draw, watch TV, play a mobile game, or just be outside. And that is absolutely lovely. While her creative side has mostly been put to use with numerous art supplies, toys, and interactions with friends - I’d never been successful in getting her interest going for tech related things. Working in support for a major cloud provider, and now as a trainer in that same company is something I do that she struggles to understand fully. If you ask my daughter what I do for work her answer is “I dunno, help people with their computers?”
While that is true to an extent, I wanted to give her some sense of what “all those numbers and letters are” when I’m using the terminal to manage one of my many VM’s. I’ve tried showing her how I can set up something like Jitsi for video calling in a matter of minutes on a new instance, and show her how it works. “Oh, so it’s like Google Meet” she said, followed by moving on to whatever she was doing before. Eventually I had an idea though that would allow her to express some of her creativity while getting to use some of this tech.
She has, as many children do, created an imaginary world full of magical creatures. Hers is called a “kika fox”. She makes drawings, stories, and much conversation about these beautiful, pretend foxes. It struck me that she could take that art and digitize it - by hosting her own Wordpress site.
I asked her if she had the chance to have her own website to post her stories at if she would be interested. We talked a little about what one could do with such a site, and she quickly agreed. I found a really cool domain for her new site using one of the many new TLD’s that exist nowadays: kikafox.party
Using the Marketplace application from Linode, I spun up a new Wordpress server pretty quickly. This then led to my daughter blowing the dust off of her laptop (an old Windows machine that I had repurposed for use with Pop!_OS) and we got to updating it, installing a password manager for all of her cool new creds, and ensuring that the Wordpress theme she wanted to use suited her style. She ran to find a notebook where she had written some stories about Kika and her family and got to work on making some new posts.
The curiosity began to work in this space:
“Can I add pictures?” “Can I show my friends?” “Will this be on Google?”
We also got to talk about formatting, proper spelling and punctuation, and what it means to have the keys to post things to the world publicly.
My hope is that this project is something that we can continue to do together as a daddy/daughter team while sneaking in some learning about web servers and the internet. Who knows, maybe I’ll have a great web designer in the immediate family some day. If not, that won’t change a thing with our relationship - but it doesn’t hurt to try and expose your kids to learning a skill even at the age of 9.