The perils of making a simple website
This has been a long time coming. I honestly have been trying to start up a blog for a while, and every so often, it has worked! However, I haven't really kept one up for very long, and I think I now know why. Technically speaking, scope creep has killed every attempt so far - once I have something working, I start thinking about how I can prevent myself having to set it all up again.
This happens even if it's all static files and raw HTML. I still have the rest of the setup for the server itself, and I keep trying to use reverse proxies to try and route requests. This would be fine if I had an easy way to backup /etc, and to backup package lists, and to backup dotfiles, and restore everything every time my VPS providers catch fire or lose my data. I've had to restart my entire setup and config six or seven times now? I'm sure this is because I use cheap VPSes and providers who aren't huge orgs like DigitalOcean or AWS - but I have to for my own sanity. I really don't like relying on centralized services, both from a privacy standpoint and from a more personal desire to have my own corner of the internet be infinitely customizable, in a way many shared hosts cannot provide.
On my old sites, I used to host a Mumble server as well for my friends to use. We would frequently become frustrated with the quality of voice chat in video games, and we'd either use Teamspeak or Mumble depending on who had their server working that day. I certainly can't do that with a shared host that has a wordpress admin page built into their control panel. These days I have less use for Mumble as everyone seems to have moved to Discord, or Matrix/Jitsi/XMPP for the cool kids. I still would like to have custom, raw HTML pages though, so the cheapest shared hosts still aren't an option for me.
VPSes have the issue of differing operating systems and frequently, different kernels. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but I can't export a list of packages I've installed and simply import them on another server - I have to make sure the packages are named the same on my new provider's Debian distro as they were on my old provider's CentOS machine. This also means config files are frequently found in slightly different places, or even different formats sometimes, and some services won't start if my provider is using a kernel that's too old or is compiled with different options. I'm fine with this on a per-server level, since I don't really mind going through the process of setting up a server most of the time. The issue arises when I have to do it multiple times, and do it differently each time. I forget steps, and I spend hours trying to figure out what I missed, how to work around new problems, and how to get the services I had running, running again.
I tried to solve this by using Ansible, which worked great for small things. It helps make sure I have all the right packages installed, all the right files on the servers I want them on, all run from my laptop wherever I decide to make changes from, all in one command. I can bring up a server to my specification in minutes. I bounced off of it several times, probably partially due to ADHD. That wasn't the entire issue though - it was very difficult to conceptualize the config files I already knew in YAML. It's hard to wrap my head around reading playbooks and configuring config files in a format that looks nothing like the config files I know, and having to have the actual config file open to the side anyways, then the sparse playbook documentation if there was any, the module documentation if there was any, then figuring out whether there should be something stored in the vault as well, and accessing that each time. I have multiple monitors, I had several windows open at all times, and I had my laptop next to me, but I could not figure out a good workflow to save my life. It felt like I couldn't get any momentum even if I knew the service and how it should work already, and having several sets of documentation open, especially for new programs I wanted to try, was absolutely overwhelming.
None of this should have stopped me from having a long-form blog running, but it always fell by the wayside as I struggled with other issues on the same machine. It never felt like it was as important as the other problems I was dealing with, or as important as having a git repo I could access from anywhere, or as having a password database I can sync to, or a shell server I could jump to my other machines from (as examples). These are all little things, but I'd always forget why I was doing it, who I wanted to share anything with, in the storm of yaml and ini and json.
I realized if I want to share anything, I need to get back to the basics. A small long-form blog, on a server I wasn't fucking with configs literally all the time, as static pages, that anyone can access anytime, separate from my other projects and their associated maintenance. I remembered signing up for a tilde.town account years ago, and I'm happy to report they're alive and well! I'm bringing things back here - a small blog generated with Pelican to start, where I'll post about things we make, the stuff we do, and then some static pages in normal HTML and CSS to brush up on the basics.
I'm doing this in Pelican so that, if they want, the other two who share my body can contribute as well. This will be the same long-form blog, we'll just post as different authors. Posts will be tagged and categorized, so they should be easy to sort through once we've got a few written. The best part is, these are still static pages. If I'm understanding Pelican correctly, you won't need to worry about cookies. Minimal JS on the page, no tracking scripts, the most that'll happen is that tilde.town can see IP addresses of people that visit. I don't think that they do anything nefarious with information like that. It's cozy here. I have a plant growing in my shell. I can talk to people and ask for help and talk about fun stuff instead of getting lost in the weeds and getting frustrated with trying to run one server for all my ideas. I think I'm going to ditch the idea of running a VPS that does everything for me, so you'll be able to find me here for a good while.
Catch you later!
-- Cerena