My blog and personal page, reloaded
After almost a year since the last post I published, it was time for a revolution in my personal space on the “The Internets”. Lots of things have happened in my life since May 2013, but on this “reboot” post I’ll just talk about what has changed on the blog itself.
Even though there was absolute silence (no new posts or pages), I have been working on this site a lot behind the scenes. Almost everything in my homepage has changed. To cite a few aspects of this site that changed:
- Domain name (and subdomain)
- Publishing framework (and page/post storage/markup format)
- Hosting
Starting with the maybe most obvious: the address of this site (as of the date when this post was published) is paucasedmatura.alvb.in. I now own the domain alvb.in (where ALVB stands for “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis”). This homepage (paucasedmatura) is the first subdomain of alvb.in. The aphorism “Pauca, sed matura” literally translates to “few, but ripe”, and helps to explain the other aspects that changed in the bulleted list above.
I changed from using Wordpress as blogging platform to serving a static site generated with Hakyll. The usual advantages of static site generators can be cited to justify this change (SSGs are apparently “all the rage” now), but for me what mattered the most was to make the site more portable and future-proof. Even if Hakyll simply disappears, I’m sure there will be for decades to come tools that can work with and publish documents written in plain text with markdown annotations. Of course, using Haskell to generate my homepage is also an extra point :)
Finally, I moved from hosting my personal site in a VPS at Amazon EC2 to GitHub pages. Ultimately, I want to self-host the site, though, as part of a broader move a lot of my data and services used by me to computers that I own. For example, I envision having my own e-mail server, file backup (cloud sync) server and so forth, and they will all be under alvb.in.
So that’s it for now! There’s now a long queue of posts and updates to publish here in the following weeks. Hopefully after “breaking the ice” these updates will come a bit more frequently than in the last year.