All articles in the "My Hugo Site" series
Time for a new blog
In the mid 2000’s I created a blog on the then “Windows Live Spaces”, it was mainly a dump for my tech notes as that could access from anywhere, this worked fine until the service was shutdown in 2011. I had found a use for “blogging” the served me and the platform allowed for others to give me feedback, a surprise that others were reading my notes, finding them useful and helping me improve them.
Looking for a replacement that was similar, I went with Wordpress as a lot of sites I was visiting were WP sites. This was the first time that I paid an internet subscription that was not my ISP fees. Ouch and also a bit confusing to get started with, but I got the hang of it and eventually registered a domain for my site in 2013 “webby.land”, a quirky TLD that friends could not understand could work on the internet.
After suffering the ever increasing WordPress monthly fees, having my site hacked, WP loosing the database etc. I looked at alternatives and learnt that I could migrate and host my own WordPress site, cheaper and what could go wrong.
A Failure to Launch
My first attempt was some DuckDNS, CNAME magic and port forwarding from my modem/router to local hosting in a lxc container on a raspberry pi with MySQL server in the same container. This Pi also hosted my home automation system that I was creating. The metrics logging killed the sd card and killed my blog site. At least lxc allows for easy snapshot backups
Round Two
Lessons learnt (on both blog hosting and (home automation)[categories/automation] ). Built a server for my growing storage needs and and running my virtual machines and containers, settled on Proxmox VE (version 4.4) and never looked back. I setup another WordPress site and database, same DuckDNS, CNAME and port forwarding magic, all was good, called the this site “Kicking and Screaming…and now its broken” to reflect the brute force, doggedness to learning and sharing my successes and frustration….Until my site got hacked and database wiped. Joy!.
Success is Progressive
After a lot of progess with my (home lab)[categories/homelab], not doing stupid things like poking holes into my home network, setting up firewalls, creating vlans, moving my wordpress site and database to docker, using treafik port forwarding and Cloudflare tunnels….I was positive I had my WordPress site self hosting “all sorted”. Ah WordPress
Not Quite There…Yet.
So it turns out that securely exposing services to the internet is not that easy, and requires a lot careful planing, configuration, testing and monitoring. I had just starting learning about (cyber security)[categories/cybersecurity] and had progressed beyond “what you don’t know, you don’t know” to “there is a hell of a lot I don’t know”, so I was paranoid. The constant tracking of WordPress, docker, nginx etc CVE’s, monitoring logs (oh so many logs) and keeping Everything patched and updated was. Just. Not. Fun. After nearly 20 years of blogging, I felt, by my own over complicating it, over whelmed and over it. So I shut it down, didn’t renew the domain and decided it best to focus on my course and studies.
A New Hope
“Knowledge is the antidote to fear” - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
More importantly, learning things like the cyber security principle of “attack surface reduction”, had me viewing my want to begin blogging again from a different perspective. The need for self host was finance reduction. WordPress and databases online as a SAAS comes at a fee, someone has to manage the risk (did I say I was cheep?).
The risk I would need to control is the exposure of a database, nginx webserver running PHP hosting WordPress. What if I could reduce the attack surface of dynamic database driven site, to a simple static website. Many online services can be press ganged into serving a static site of html, CSS and JS…for free, a good price.
Managing and growing a blog site based solely on html pages used be a thing, I think I would rather walk on lego then go down that path. I have begun researching Static Site Generators.
I think this will be a good distraction and I look forward to eventually putting this post online.
My journey with Hugo is just beginning, and I’m excited to explore its more advanced features, such as shortcodes for embedding dynamic content and data- driven pages. For now, I’m incredibly satisfied with its speed, simplicity, and the control it gives me over my blog’s presentation.
If you’re looking for a fast, flexible, and powerful way to build a website, especially a blog focused on technical content, I highly recommend giving Hugo a try. It’s been an invaluable tool in documenting and sharing my own path of learning and discovery.