Recently I decided it’s about time to retire the ancient server that has been running my website (and mail and dns and a bunch of other things) - It’s a Northwood Pentium 4 Xeon from 2002, the kind with Hyperthreading. Running Linux 3.7.10. 32-bit.

Yes, that’s old.

Rather than upgrade, I’m probably moving all of this somewhere else, likely a cheap VPS somewhere… and since there’s a whole bunch of really old Perl running things here… I’ve been doing some rewriting.

Static webpage generation

The original website I put on this current server used a backend based on some unspeakable perl, but the most recent was using Pylons… and by “recent” I mean circa 2010. So yeah, that’s got to be redone. I pondered another web application, but decided that rather than doing on-the-fly content generation from templates, why not just pre-generate it?

So that’s what I’m doing. I’ve started building a bunch of Python scripts using, Jinja templates, and Markdown for blog content. Naturally, all run by Makefiles.

Let’s Encrypt

Since I’m doing it all new, I’m finally going to go full SSL, via Let’s Encrypt. Yeah, about time.

So yeah. Stay tuned.