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