2023-01-18
I’m a bit sceptical about social media in general so a few years back I decided to create a place where I am fully in control of the content that can act as the one source of truth about me on the internet. My “web-home” as it were! I like to think that this site reflects how I like to approach things in both my personal life and in my work life. It is straight forward and uncomplicated. There is no flashy artwork, animations or technology here that didn’t exist in the 90s (A bit brutalist in my opinion) and that is by design to make it easy to maintain. Even the images have been very compressed to save on bandwidth as well as energy usage.
Originally I had hosted this website using an operating system whose design and goals I really admire (OpenBSD), and a static site generator called Jekyll. I launched the site and promptly forgot about it since it’s one of those things I want to be there but to not have to think much about. A couple of months later I got a security alert on my Github account that a library I was using had a security vulnerability, so I had to take some time away from what I wanted to be doing that day to fix it. Some time later OpenBSD updated and I needed to learn how to do the upgrade.
A lesson that I took away from that experience was that if I want this thing to actually run, be available all the time, and spend as little time as possible maintaining it, is to do the simplest thing possible. So I relaunched the server using Debian Stable as the operating system (I’ve been using Debian for about 20 years now so while I’m by no means an expert I have very little to learn to accomplish simple tasks), and re-wrote the site in plain HTML. In general I think software developers have a tendency to over-engineer things.
Now all I have to to to keep this thing running is run a command every two years to update Debian. If I want to write new content I just edit an HTML file and commit it to git. As long as I keep paying the bills this thing should run forever.
Update 2023-07-26: I transitioned to a makefile based build system to support the blog. It’s pretty simple compared to Jekyll and does exactly what I need it to.