--- title: "New Website" date: "2025-05-16T13:16:00-06:00" 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 published a proper website at [https://d-b.ca/](https://d-b.ca/). The last time I had anything live on this domain was over 20 years ago, according to the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/). What took so long? Over the years I've learned a lot, and I'm constantly experimenting with new ways of getting things done. This site, while useful in its own right, is a culmination of the platform I've developed to host it. ## History My 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 was still quite young, but the university provided students with the means to publish web content. It was mostly a novelty at the time and didn't last beyond my time at school, but it sparked my interest in Internet technologies and their applications. That early site included 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 began when I was working at a local Internet service provider. I was able to get a special deal on a business-class broadband connection at home, which included a small network block (a `/28`, or 16 IP addresses) that I could use. I dedicated my most powerful machine to be my server and developed several services, including a new website. My website at that time wasn't fancy, and was geared primarily towards experimentation. I developed a simple content management system from scratch in PHP3, which I used to publish a blog. It also integrated with mailing lists, another area I was exploring at the time. ### D-B.CA I hadn't registered a domain name of my own in those early days, so everything resided under a friend's domain. In late 2002, I decided to finally register one of my own, primarily so I could have a stable email address. I came up with `d-b.ca` because someone was squatting on `db.ca` – and still is, I might add. Early on, I focused mostly on operating my email services and other experiments, with little attention paid to a website. There were a few test pages at times, but nothing substantial. ## Modern Technology One of the projects I've been following is [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/). I've seen and worked with various web content management systems in the past, and they often feel cumbersome and present security concerns. Hugo is an example of a "Static Site Generator," which transforms a source description of a site into the static resources used to serve it – 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, as traditional CMS systems do. Using Hugo is much easier with a good base template, and 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 the sources for the site can be treated like software code, making it 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. Feel free to take a look: {{< gitea repo="d-b.ca/web" >}} ### CI/CD I've also set up a CI/CD pipeline to build and deploy the site whenever changes are made to the source repository. The CI portion is triggered by a push to the web repository. It runs a workflow that builds the site and packages the resulting artifacts into a container image based on [Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/). The build container with Hugo is another image 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 the platform this site is running on, and some of the history and decisions that drove its design.