web/content/posts/new-website/index.md

title, date, description, summary

title	date	description	summary
New Website	2025-06-10T08:00:00-06:00	There's finally a new website at d-b.ca.	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/. The last time I had anything live on this domain was over 20 years ago, according to the Wayback Machine. 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, near the end of the previous century. The web was still in its early stages, 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. The only way at the time that was available for generating dynamic content in a website was CGI, and the university did not allow student sites to use it. So, I wrote some shell scripts that were called as part of my login and logout scripts that would generate the static HTML file and write it to my web content directory. It needed to handle cases like multiple logins, and the logout script didn't always get triggered, so I'd have to keep an eye on it for stale entries.

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, consisting of 16 IP addresses) that I could use. I dedicated my most powerful machine as 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. 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 solid base template. There are many to choose from, including the one I've selected here called "Blowfish".

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. What does this mean?

CI = Continuous Integration

This is the practice of frequently integrating changes into a source repository. The changes are checked, assembled, and packaged through automated processes. More information

CD = Continuous Delivery

This is the capability of being able to take new changes (such as the outputs of the CI process) and getting them deployed and running automatically. More information

The CI portion is triggered by a push to the web repository. It runs an automated workflow that builds the site and packages the resulting artifacts into a container image based on Caddy. This image contains everything needed to serve the website. The build container with Hugo is another image I maintain in this repository:

{{< gitea repo="d-b.ca/hugo-builder" >}}

After the workflow has built the container image for running the website, it updates the CD GitOps repository to deploy this new version immediately to a private staging site. Another definition:

GitOps refers to the practice of managing infrastructure automation by keeping machine-readable descriptions of the intended infrastructure in a version-controlled Git repository. A CD system will monitor the repository for changes, immediately adding, modifying, or removing infrastructure to bring the state of the operational system into alignment with the source description.

When I want to publish the new version as the production site, I use my regular private production GitOps repository to update the image tag, and the rest happens automatically. The CD repository for the staging site is public, you're welcome to check it out here:

{{< gitea repo="d-b.ca/db-cd" >}}

Pipeline Diagram

{{< mermaid >}} flowchart TB subgraph GIT [Git Repository] WR[(Web)] CDR[(CD)] end

WP(Push Web Updates)-->WR WP ~~~ HBI

subgraph CI [CI Workflow] CIP[Pull Source Repository]-->BWI[Build Web Image] BWI-->PWI[Push Web Image] PWI-->UCD[Update CD Repository] end

PWI-->WI WR-->CIP

subgraph DOCKER [Image Repository] HBI((Hugo Build)) WI((Web)) end

HBI-->BWI

UCD-->CDP(Push Image Update) CDP-->CDR CDR-->CDPull

subgraph CD [CD Process] CDPull[Pull Source Repository]-->DWI[Deploy Web Image] end

WI-->DWI {{< /mermaid >}}

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.