Sprucing Up

Hi there reader, it’s me, a year and a half since my last post. I’ve just finished some major changes.

In December 2014 I posted about how I’d move to Amazon Web Services from Dreamhost and how that was a huge deal. Well, in the four years since I’ve migrated from that to Google Cloud for a brief stint to finally settling on Digital Ocean running an Arch Linux distribution with Apache. Yesterday saw me tinkering with that somewhat, ripping out Arch and replacing it with Ubuntu running a number of Docker containers. I don’t think I’ve had as much fun as I’ve had setting all that up - seriously, Docker really makes setting up servers fun!

Which brings me to this blog. I’ve thrown out the static site generator Hugo and replaced it with a Docker container running Ghost which is a hell of a lot snazzier. Hannah’s website gas switched from my self rolled invention to a much more streamlined Wordpress installation. And my simple homepage is staying simple, running in its own Docker container but still a simple bit of pure HTML.

Aside from learning how useful and quick Docker is, in the four years since making this blog I’ve learned it doesn’t matter how fancy your back end implementation is if nobody can or can be bothered to use it. A static website generator such as Hugo was a new school of thought in 2014 and it’s still great in quite a few applications. But I can’t be bothered to write markdown in a text editor, generate a new static site, and upload it to my server. I want to be able to log in to a web interface, write a post, publish, and do something else. The creation for Hannah’s website, while serving its purpose well, didn’t allow for easy customization, client interaction (through the likes of a control panel), and definitely wasn’t future proof - or dare I say stable.

Now I can just log into an admin panel and knock up a quick blog post. Now Hannah can customize her portfolio to her heart’s content and add whatever content she wants. Now I can deploy a new blog, database, or even a container running Dwarf Fortress in about 10 minutes with little to no headache.

Is this me committing to writing more frequent blog posts in the new year, as I’ve done previously? No. Is it more probable I’ll keep this updated in the future? Definitely.

Have fun folks!