After a years-long hiatus, the blog (and the rest of my site) is back, huzza! Although I don't expect much of it (the traffic numbers from last-time indicated I was the #1 reader) I've decided to resurrect my web-presence. This will, once again, be a place for me to post up things I want to talk about, or just material I want to have handy for reference (like my server-hardening guide).
This time around I wanted to do something a tad simpler. Last time I used a web-hosting provider, a CMS, and threw everything behind Cloudflare. Although that's still do-able, recently (in the last year) I've been doing more research into (and building) small, minimalistic sites, the Small Internet, and other cool related stuff. This skewed my perspective pretty far when I was thinking about how I wanted to set up this site again, with the original implementation being a single-page (no blog), highly cut-down (no un-needed tags) html doc that I'd host using GitHub Pages and would have extremely minimal content (a la: Name and Email). Thankfully, reason prevailed.
I decided that the benefits of that minimal hosting setup were outweighed by the problems, namely leaving an email address in an open repo on GitHub (which defeats some of the protections I appreciate). Thus the solution that I ended up with was the next-best thing.
This blog is hand-crafted, artisanal, free-range HTML, and in-line (really in-page) CSS. It's written in Sublime Text (gedit just couldn't keep up with how much white-space help I needed). From there I run an Ansible playbook that copies the files straight to the web-root on my tiny OVH VPS. Then nginx does what web-servers do best and serves up a compressed, static html file (hopefully from it's cache!) to Cloudflare (assuming CF isn't itself serving from cache), who serves the file to your browser!
A beautiful system, working together at blazing speeds for surprising low-cost to me. That's it for now, stay tuned for more (hopefully) useful thoughts to fill this new space!
Happy Hacking!
- Chris