During vacation i decided to give my Blog a makeover. It was hosted at Blogger for a couple of years and helplessly outdated. Over time i felt it was too limited for “tech stuff”. Not that there was a lack of topics to cover, blogging just never felt “natural” to me. I also recognized that it’s quite pointless to replicate content which has already been written a dozen time.
So, for the makeover i set up Nginx on a virtual server. It came as a great co-incidence that the folks at Let’s encrypt chose me for their closed beta. A set of commonly trusted SSL certs certainly fuled my interest a bit more. In that process i optimized the sites SSL configuration. Remy van Elst has put out a great collection of Nginx/SSL related topics. While deploying all those settings and tune-ups it crossed my mind that back in 1998 “SSLEngine on” (Apache 1.3) was almost all someone needed to secure their HTTP traffic. Well, nowadays you have to be aware of a dozen potential attacks, cipher suites, special headers and what not. No wonder people are fleeing to the arms of content silos which provide all that as a service.
Evaluating the blog-o-sphere showed that most technically good solutions require to give away your blog posts to some media/advertising based company. Meh, just got away from that when leaving Blogger. On the self-hosted area there still is the usual suspect: Wordpress.
Given the available system resources, clunkyness and security issues with dynamic sites i went in another direction. Well, my decades long dislike of PHP and current interest in NodeJS led me to Hexo. In a nutshell, this is a static site generator which transforms Markdown to HTML and adds some prettiness using CSS based on Themes. It’s not close that “powerful” from a feature perspective but that was exactly what i was looking for. Heck, it even lacks a rich-text editor - typing these posts in vim feels awkwardly “personal” and cool. It might just be the perfect fit since i developed quite a minimalistic approach to IT over time.
So, what to expect on this blog? I definitelly will get into daily life stuff more, share some experiences, awesome articles i stumbled upon and review stuff. Tech will obviously always be a part but not the primary reason to keep a blog. I’ll keep English as the default for my postings but may occasionally switch to German for more regional topics.