Where have I been?

I’ve been busy. As you may already know from my about section. I am still completing my Bachelor’s in computer science. As well, I’m working nearly full-time.

What a lame excuse

You’re right. I know this is purely for my own enjoyment, and as more of a personal diary, rather than content that people are going to be consuming. Yet, I still want to hold myself to some sort of standard. Thus, the loss of my site for ~6 months is a little disappointing.

The real reasons

My server was shut off for quite some time due to a few reasons.

Firstly, the hardware I was running on was an early 2000s thinkstation with a used pentium I bought and swapped in for the CPU, just to give it a little extra beef. It runs hot, the fans are louder than a 747 at full speed, and the CMOS is failing and irreplacable. All in all, not a good recipe for a server you wish to be running at 100% uptime.

Not to mention, I live in quite an old house, the power to my house is constantly hit with brownouts, causing the router and server to go down. My ISP refuses to give us a static IP address, thus the domain always ends up being routed to the wrong IP after these brownouts. As well as the server needing to be manually rebooted because of the CMOS issues.

Moving on

I got the inspiration to restart this project quite recently due to finding a very cheap server pc on Facebook Marketplace. The Dell Wyze 5070. I picked one of these up for $50 and let me tell you. The experience has been much more pleasant. It’s noiseless, takes up far less space and runs at 1/3rd of the power draw, being equipped with an Intel Celeron.

I also wanted to move to a more bleeding edge distrobution, as Debian, as stable as it is, gives more headaches than anything when you’re working with non-standard application hosting, such as I.

Stepping into Arch linux, a distrobution I’m quite familiar with ended up severing a lot of things. werc, the static site generator I was using previously gave me countless issues when trying to reproduce my setup on Arch. I’m still not quite sure if this is due to the arch plan9 packages not being properly packaged, or if they’re packaged differently than Debian’s. Regardless of the problem, I could not get it working after hours of tinkering, so I decided to move on to something newer.

I can proudly say that this site is now powered by hugo. While far less minimal than I was going for with werc, I could not find anything that matched it, with the extensibility I was looking for. hugo has the spirit of werc I was looking for, simple themes, endless extensibility and ease of use.