On the other side of infinity

Every time I start anew I manage to fall into the trap of writing an about page, writing about why I start anew, and someplace along the lines I also dive into writing about the countless sites I’ve had in the past. I hopes to skip some of that point that for sometime I have had preference for staticly generated websites. I love many aspects of static site generation from the lack of databases, the ability to track/see changes a post/page, and the output can be deploy anywhere. A static build system also lets me tinker until I’m able to generate something that, well… something that satisfy that self-indulgent desire to feel special.

A few years back that same self-indulgent desire lead me to wanting to buy a Raspberry Pi and build something with it… maybe build a NAS, run a personal git server, or even a VPN. That quickly turned into buying a second Pi that was a little faster and could do a little more. As I became more consumed with the project the more I realize the Pi’s where not what I really wanted.

Eventually I landed on vultr, and a $2.50/month micro-cloud instance. I would no longer need to worry about something as simple as a Pi not receiving enough power leading corruption of SD card. The micro-cloud instance also gave me a super fast network and disk I/O. I chose to give Fedora a try and eh… it wasn’t want I wanted and I walked away from my project ideas and I kept the instance going… just sitting around burning up the the pre-paid credits and promo credits I had.

I don’t know how but I stumbled accross traefik which is a clever peice of software which removes many (of my) headaches while self hosting, but the big one to me is wildcard certificates with Let’s Encrypt ACME V2. It helped rekindle my desire to do some self hosting and I circled back to my vultr instance. Now I know a rolling distro isn’t the ideal choice for a server, I know so many ‘things’ can go wrong. However, I prefer Arch Linux over Fedora simply because I find that same contentment in running pacman -Syu as I find tinkering with a static build system.

One project I’ve been wanting to tackle for sometime had running my own git server, with a web presence; which is another topic all together. I knew I would face a few obstacles, documenting the solutions lead me to running an instanace of Ghost.

Ghost is where this all starts. I’ve been growing tired of my Gatsby based site simply because I don’t have the time to invest in the “tooling”. I did not want the site to stagnate and lag behind the tip of the spear. It had lagged because I ultimately did not want to invest the time. That is a telling sign that I need to make a few changes. I already have a Ghost instance running maybe that could work out.

Is running a dockerized instance of Ghost on a low end VPN instance with memory constraints is not a wise choice. I realize all that idiosyncratic, self-indulgent, tinkering has prevent me communicating my thoughts and ideas. A good solution would be keeping a static build, it was involve Lessing “tooling” and mostly it would involve selecting a theme that I could live with. I was left picking between Jekyll and Hugo, Hugo has less tooling and the winner.

With any luck I will be better at communicating me.