Docker

So I took a look at my blog recently to make sure everything is working, and got a big fat “Your connection is not secure” message. Uh oh! Fortunately I just need to request a new certificate from Let’s Encrypt and install it. I’ve done this before, it’s a 10 minute job. Buuuuuttt… what if I could automate it? If I spend all afternoon on this I’ll save myself 15 minutes of work every 3 months! That math totally works out right? What does the XKCD guy have to say about it? ...

One of my projects during my vacation has been to take back control of my data. The question of online privacy is a difficult one, because while there’s some things you can do to improve your privacy, to really own your data takes a lot of effort and learning. For most people, hosting their own services is more headache than it’s worth. There’s a lot of good privacy-conscious services out there if you’re willing to pay, but most people are not willing to pay. The convenience trumps the privacy concerns, and for me it has been that way for a long time as well. ...

I’ve been on a serious docker/aws kick recently. I’ve learned just enough that it drives me to play with it. I spent a lot of my free time on it this week, and didn’t spend as much as I’d like on learning Albanian… This could be a problem… Anyways I might as well post more about what I’ve learned. I’ve been wanting to make my web server more robust, to where if it dies for whatever reason I don’t have to do anything, it’ll come back on a new instance all on its own. Unfortunately that’s a bit more difficult than you’d expect. Lots of moving parts. ...

I had some time off today so I decided to revisit how I’m hosting all my stuff. One of my issues with using Amazon’s container service is that they make you assign resource values to each container, and those are not flexible. So, I have to give each container high enough memory that it won’t die, but then I run out of space on my server real quick. Since most of the stuff I want to host just sits idle the majority of the time, this wasn’t ideal for me. ...

Here’s another technical post for y’all! I had some time this past weekend, so I took a look into the website I made a year ago for Reclaimed. The old version was made with Locomotive CMS, and hosted on Locomotive hosting. It was a good choice at the time, because we needed something fast. We wanted to deploy it before the 2015 super bowl. I’d previously looked into moving it to Wordpress or Drupal, but that would basically require redoing the whole site. More work than I’m willing to put in. But, just this past weekend, Locomotive v3 came out. I decided to try hosting it myself, because $20/mo is just a bit too much to be paying for a simple website like this. Plus, it would be fun! (or so I thought.) ...

Locked out! I managed to lock myself out of my EC2 instance when I was managing my keys. So in order to update my blog, I had to deploy it to a new EC2 instance. I decided to take the opportunity to improve the way I’m deploying new versions of my site. Note: This will be a technical post. If you’re following along with my adventure in Albania, you can skip this one. ...