Otober 15, 2024
So, this is it. My first blog post. I've been reading a lot of interesting blogs lately and have been wanting to make my own blog for a little while now. I don't exactly know what I'll be posting here, but boy have I got some ideas. Look forward to them! (I didn't say they will be good)
I had a website set up on AWS (my previous lukekrauss.com) on their shittiest, cheapest machine, and they eventually decided I had to pay and they were going to charge me $20 a month. Why so much? Beats me. I shut that website down. They already control a huge chunk of the web, let's not give them anymore, eh? Instead, I'm hosting this on my own used computer in my partner's apartment (I don't live anywhere. Yet). In theory, this will be cheap, and I'll have more control. Honestly, I'm just doing it 'cause it seems kinda fun.
This server is running FreeBSD using lighttpd. It's a really basic setup with minimal bells and whistles. I'd like to keep it at minimal as possible, both to reduce cost and to reduce complexity (don't we all prefer simplicity?) There isn't much to say about this. I'm starting out with just some basic access logging for analytics. There's no backend at all. I'm just serving static files directly. I'm not sure I see te point of a backend for this website, since I have no dynamic content. There's a chance I'll change some of this, but for now I'm keeping it as minimal as possible. Funnily enough, the website has just barely been online and people are already probing for exploits. Weird.
As for how I'm writing the articles and posting them... Well, honestly I'm just using VSCode and writing raw HTML. I made some basic CSS for the pages that I'm sure I'll have to fine-tune as time goes on. I haven't sorted out a nice automated publishing system just yet, so currently I just push to a git repository I have hosted on the server. I then pull the changes in a clone of that repository and voila! All my pages are static, and I'd like them to stay that way!
Big shoutout to cheapskatesguide for basically inspiring this website. I realized I wanted to have a website on my own machine, and the guide, "How to Host Your Own Website at Home for $2 a Year" was super helpful as a starting point. It turned me on to lighttpd and gave me lots of ideas for how to run the website. I made things a big harder on myself by using FreeBSD, but it wasn't that much extra complexity.
Seriously. I hate Google Analytics and what it's done to the modern web. I don't want annoying trackers on this website, and I want the website to be as fast and light-weight as possible. I won't ever have a JavaScript tracker here, analytics be damned. Okay, but also I do want to know which posts of mine get the most views (and so do you), so I'll cook up a way to do that. Stay tuned.
That's all for now. I have a few posts lined up that I'll post right away (cause just having a hello world is pretty lame). After that, I'm hoping to post once a week for at least a little while. Thanks for reading!