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+---
+title: "New Website"
+date: "2025-05-11T12:00:00-06:00"
+description: "There's finally a new website at d-b.ca."
+summary: "I've published my personal website. A brief history of some past endeavours, and some details on the technology behind the new site."
+---
+
+I've finally gotten around to publishing a proper website here at
+[https://d-b.ca/](https://d-b.ca/). The last time I had anything up on this
+domain was over 20 years ago, according to the
+[Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/). What took me so long? Over the
+years I've learned a lot, and I'm constantly trying out new ways of getting
+things done. This site, although intended to be useful in its own right, is a
+culmination of the platform I've developed to host it.
+
+## History
+
+My very first personal website was developed while I was a student at the
+[University of Alberta](https://ualberta.ca), near the end of the previous
+century. The web itself hadn't been around for very many years, but the
+university did provide the means for every student to publish web content.
+It was mostly a novelty at the time, and didn't last beyond my time at the
+school, but it was part of the beginning of how I got interested in Internet
+technologies and how they can be applied.
+
+That early site did include one interesting feature. I developed a mechanism
+to automatically update a page every time I logged into one of the school's
+computers, so my friends could find me if they wanted to.
+
+### Self-Hosting
+
+I've always been an avid self-hoster. It started when I was working at a local
+Internet services provider. I was able to get a special deal on a
+business-class broadband connection at home, which came with a `/28` subnet
+that I could use. I dedicated the largest machine I had on hand at the time as
+my server, and developed many services, including a new website.
+
+My website at this time was nothing fancy, and was mostly geared towards
+experimentation. I developed a simple content management system from scratch
+in PHP3, which I used to publish a blog. It had some integration with mailing
+lists, which I was also experimenting with quite a lot at the time.
+
+### D-B.CA
+
+I hadn't registered a domain name of my own in those early days, so everything
+was listed under a friend's domain name. In late 2002, I decided to finally
+register one of my own, mainly so I could have a stable email address. I came
+up with `d-b.ca`, because someone was squatting on `db.ca` --- which is still
+squatted on to this very day, I might add.
+
+Early on I was mostly involved in operating my email services and other
+experiments, and didn't focus much on a website. There were a few test pages
+at times, but nothing serious.
+
+## Modern Technology
+
+One of the projects I've been keeping an eye on is [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/).
+I've seen and worked with various web content management systems in the past,
+and they tend to be rather cumbersome and a source of security concerns. Hugo
+is an example of what's called a "Static Site Generator", which transforms a
+source description of a site into the set of static resources used to serve
+the site, much like a compiler. The resulting static resources can be served
+as regular files from any web service, without the need for dynamically
+generating content upon request from a database like a traditional CMS.
+
+Using Hugo is much easier with a good base template, of which there are
+[many to choose from](https://themes.gohugo.io/). I've chosen one called
+["Blowfish"](https://blowfish.page/) for this site.
+
+Another benefit of a static site generator is that all of the sources for the
+site can be treated like software code, meaning that it's simple to use
+development tools like git for version control. I keep the sources for this
+site in a public repository on my own git server, have a look at this link
+if you like.
+
+{{< gitea repo="d-b.ca/web" >}}
+
+### CI/CD
+
+I have also set up a CI/CD pipeline to handle building and deploying the site
+whenever anything is changed in the source repository. The CI portion is
+triggered by a push to the web repository. It runs a workflow that builds the
+site and then packages the resulting artifacts into a container image based on
+[Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/). The build container with Hugo is another
+image that I maintain in this repository.
+
+{{< gitea repo="d-b.ca/hugo-builder" >}}
+
+Next, the workflow updates the CD Gitops repository to deploy this new version
+to a private staging site. When I want to publish the new version as the
+production site, I use my regular Gitops repository to update the image tag
+and the rest happens automatically.
+
+{{< gitea repo="d-b.ca/db-cd" >}}
+
+## Underlying Platform
+
+In my next article, I'll describe more about the platform that this site is
+running on, and some of the history and desicions that were made to get
+everything up and running.