I have a new website!
For a long time I’ve used WordPress. It’s nice, but a little bit intense, and it can be really slow. I spent hours and hours trying to tweak my database server, caching server, web server, and so on.. with limited success. Alas, I’m only an amateur sysadmin.
Looking for a change, I have moved to a Hugo-based website. Hugo is what’s called a “static site generator,” which is a fancy way of saying “write in some text files, hit a button, and your website is built real quick.” Basically, my website is now just regular old HTML files that live on my server. No database, no caching, no fancy stuff. It’s a lot like websites were in 1997, at least in terms of how it works when you load it from your browser.
It’s been a real challenge! everything in WordPress was stored in a database in HTML. I exported it as XML, imported into Jekyll, exported it as markdown, then imported into Hugo. I spent quite a bit of time manually and semi-manually tweaking things so they will load and look nicer. I’m not done with this, so you’ll probably see lots of weird stuff if you browse my site right now.
Another thing I’ve been working on is hosting all my media on a separate server. I’ve been experimenting with a thing called Minio which lets you basically self-host Amazon S3. It makes everything faster.
I doubt anybody is really looking through my website regularly, but just in case, here are some things to check out:
- My full discography, most of it available for free streaming and download
- My “now” page - what I’ve been up to lately and what I’m doing now
- My “modular” page - all about my homemade modular synthesizer