If you’ve managed to reach this page - congratulations! That means you’ve figured out that I’ve finally reorganized my server, something I’ve been threatening to do ever since the summer I left for Europe, which was not last summer but the one before. Summer 2017.
But I’ve finally done it. Somewhat unfortunately for you, my loyal reader, this means that a) a lot of the projects that were being hosted by Pillow are no longer, and b) all of the URLs for my blog have changed.
The astute eye will notice that my blog is no longer being hosted by Wordpress, which is a break from tradition. Originally I had used Wordpress because I got my professional start at a wordpress company (WP Engine), so I got free hosting there. Eventually they audited their accounts and kicked me out (without much notice), but I continued to use wordpress because that’s the format all of my data was in. However, wordpress is quite a bit of overhead that I don’t particularly need or want - you have to maintain a working PHP version, a MySQL server, and a web server to serve the whole thing. On my system, that meant locking all of my projects to whatever version of PHP and MySQL that my Wordpress install required.
So I threw that all away, and now I use Hugo, a static site generator. It means I don’t get a WYSIWYG editor, but the upside is that the infrastructure is all stupidly simple. I have a binary blob (statically compiled, too - no requirement for having X or Y installed!) which I use to turn some raw posts written in markdown into a bunch of html files. Then, I have a docker container that has just a nginx server to host those static pages.
End result: My server is a lot more clean, my server is basically just a bunch of docker containers (16 at the moment) and some cron jobs. And, with Traefik as the frontend, I get free & easy HTTPS for my entire website.
