It’s been a year and a half since starting this version of the blog. Behind the scenes, it’s been through a lot. Originally hosted on a Vultr VPS, this blog had been passed around to Linode, it had a long stay on a prgmr.com instance, and currently resides on a Linode instance again. As I host more and more things for myself and others, I’ve found I need to take more care into how much load another website might add, etc.
This blog was also originally published using the Ghost platform. I’ve
been a big fan of Ghost for a long time, but recently they changed the
main method of writing posts1, so I’ve made the switch to using
Jekyll instead! One additional bonus here is the reduced
overhead. Ghost relied on a database, an HTTP server in addition to the
Nginx proxy, and regular updates. Jekyll, on the other hand, generated
static HTML pages that Nginx can simply serve out of a directory.
Publishing is a cinch, thanks to builds.sr.ht. On every git
push, the build will generate the static content and rsync it to my
server! See the About page for more
information on the website.
I do still have plans to add a photography portfolio to the site, but I haven’t figured out implementation yet. Lately I’ve been on a fun development kick, so it’s very likely I’ll be writing something from scratch.
Current Projects
Here’s what I’ve been spending more of my non-company time on:
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WordPress is not the CMS I need for this project. I’d love to be able to have a database of restaurants with a few properties, including a list of tags, and then the website would be able to filter against those tags. This would allow me to keep redundancies down for items that may, for example, fit in a “Pizza” tag and an “Uptown” tag. Right now I would need to manually update the pizzeria in two locations should an update be necessary.
A custom CMS is more or less in progress. I’m calling it “stocfs”, that’s for a Simple Tag Organized Content Filtering System. Feel free to check out the project page.
- stocfs, as mentioned above
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General upkeep on my various servers
For reasons I won’t go into, I’ve managed to let my general upkeep schedule slip and neglected my servers, and most projects, for a while. I’ve since gotten back into the swing of things and the servers are happier because of it! I added a new VPS to the mix. I decided to host my own Mastodon instance, and the server I threw it on was often under high load. I’ve moved a few things off the Mastodon server now onto the new VPS.
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Ghost used to be pure Markdown, but they’ve since moved to a more card-focused editing style. One of the biggest complaints I’ve seen and share is the lack of support for these wonderful footnotes! - https://blog.ghost.org/2-0/ ↩
