98 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
98 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "New Website"
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date: "2025-05-16T13:16:00-06:00"
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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 published a proper website at [https://d-b.ca/](https://d-b.ca/).
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The last time I had anything live on this domain was over 20 years ago,
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according to the [Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/). What took so
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long? Over the years I've learned a lot, and I'm constantly experimenting with
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new ways of getting things done. This site, while useful in its own right, is
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a culmination of the platform I've developed to host it.
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## History
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My 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 was still quite young, but the university provided
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students with the means to publish web content. It was mostly a novelty at the
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time and didn't last beyond my time at school, but it sparked my interest in
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Internet technologies and their applications.
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That early site included one interesting feature. I developed a mechanism to
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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 began when I was working at a local
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Internet service provider. I was able to get a special deal on a
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business-class broadband connection at home, which included a small network
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block (a `/28`, or 16 IP addresses) that I could use. I dedicated my most
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powerful machine to be my server and developed several services, including a
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new website.
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My website at that time wasn't fancy, and was geared primarily 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 also integrated with mailing
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lists, another area I was exploring 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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resided under a friend's domain. In late 2002, I decided to finally register
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one of my own, primarily so I could have a stable email address. I came up
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with `d-b.ca` because someone was squatting on `db.ca` – and still is, I might
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add.
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Early on, I focused mostly on operating my email services and other
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experiments, with little attention paid to a website. There were a few test
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pages at times, but nothing substantial.
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## Modern Technology
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One of the projects I've been following is [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/). I've
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seen and worked with various web content management systems in the past, and
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they often feel cumbersome and present security concerns. Hugo is an example
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of a "Static Site Generator," which transforms a source description of a site
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into the static resources used to serve it – much like a compiler. The
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resulting static resources can be served as regular files from any web
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service, without the need for dynamically generating content upon request from
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a database, as traditional CMS systems do.
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Using Hugo is much easier with a good base template, and 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 the sources for the
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site can be treated like software code, making it simple to use development
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tools like Git for version control. I keep the sources for this site in a
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public repository on my own Git server. Feel free to take a look:
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{{< gitea repo="d-b.ca/web" >}}
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### CI/CD
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I've also set up a CI/CD pipeline to build and deploy the site whenever
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changes are made to the source repository. The CI portion is triggered by a
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push to the web repository. It runs a workflow that builds the site and
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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 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 the platform this site is running on, and
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some of the history and decisions that drove its design.
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