And indeed welcome to my latest venture in building - and hopefully maintaining an on-line presence. It's been a while. Indeed when I checked my old blog it hadn't been updated in over a year and the server refused to update itself because the OS version had been end of lifed. So I did what any programmer would do in the circumstances. Nuked it from orbit and started from scratch.
This seemed like a good opportunity to build up a new skill set and to play with some of the neat stuff I hear all the cool kids talking about on the internet as well as get a leg up on some projects I had wanted to tackle, and so it proved.
Step one was to grab a new Linode cloud instance and get set up. Step two was to stop being that guy who just randomly logs in and pokes at stuff until it does what I want then logging out and forgetting about for months until something goes wrong. To this end I've gone for containerized services with git deploy for config files.
This - of course - means Docker. After I'd struggled through its charming approach to the macOS file system I found that I quite liked Docker and am now using it locally quite a bit. I've no idea what the hipsters are using these days, but last time I set up a site I found Nginx considerably nicer to work with than the Apache installs I'd been used to.
Much to my surprise it turns out that once you've decided to do the container thang it is the work of but minutes to set Ngnix up as reverse proxy and vend some API from a Vapor image. I've poked briefly at Vapor and been well impressed - being a huuuge Swift fan - but now I can have a good old go on it. We can also very quickly stick a certbot image in there as well to handle the SSL certificate renewals. Which is nice.
Once the infra is all in and running I needed some actual content, hence this snazzy new landing page which is mainly here just to kick the tires on the stack and see if the design actually works once there's something other than lorem ipsum in it. Needs work for sure. I am not a web designer just a humble code monkey. I was very happy to find, though, that while I hadn't been paying attention css had evolved a bunch of programmery stuff like variables and calc functions that seemed to make it feel a good deal less spiky.
So anyhoo, the plan is to stick with static HTML and CSS which apart from ensuring nippy page loads means I can stick the whole palaver behind Cloudflare which as well as making it even nippy-er means that on the off chance I ever write something popular I won't die of bil shock.
It took a surprisingly small amount of time to set all of this up. The modern tech stack really is amazing and removes a lot of the grind which will hopefully leave me time to write about fun stuff that I like. I haven't settled on a site generator strategy yet, feels like the kind of thing you want to incrementally. Probably I'll build a bunch of small tools at first and see where we go from there.
Anyhoo, that's me. Thanks for reading and feel free to hit me up on Twitter