This site is currently hosted with the excellent Firebase Hosting platform, with Namecheap as the domain registrar and DNS provider. Firebase’s complimentary Spark plan supports my needs at no cost – thank you, Firebase!
Google Domains was my favorite hosting provider, until it was retired ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Previously…
Historically, this site was first built on Blogger. Next, it ran off a self-hosted Wordpress installation off Nettigritty’s VPS. Later, this site was registered with Namecheap & served off Microsoft’s Azure platform.
These tools are used to write, publish, present, and serve the present and past websites.
Writing
- I currently write on a home-hosted code-server instance in Markdown.
- Previously:
- Visual Studio Code is my current, cross-platform editor of choice. I particularly enjoy writing markdown with the n-built preview.
- emacs (with this adaptation of jekyll.el) aided by the handy [typopunct]http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TypographicalPunctuationMarks) minor mode and unc-insert.
- Previously:
- All recent posts are written in markdown.
- Git for version control and Visual Studio Online remote repository hosting.
- Previously: Github was the remote repository.
Publishing
- Hugo for static HTML generation with the Goldmark rendering engine. My theme’s based off hasper, based off the excellent Casper theme for ghost.org1.
- Previously:
- Jekyll for static HTML generation - slow page serving and bloated functionality of various publishing platforms being the reason for a static site.
- Patched version of Jekyll to minimize the ftp-push footprint.
- Jose Gonzalez’s archive plugin for archive pages. The Jekyll sources & templates are available on Github.
- FTPSync for incremental push to live site.
Typography
- This site has been through many fonts over the years. I’m particularly drawn to serif fonts, the current fonts include:
- Gentium Book family
- Merriweather
- A few other fonts I like include:
Theme
- The current site is based on hasper for Hugo.
- A previous incarnation was based on the Munich theme for Tumblr. A snapshot of my customization is at github.com/scharan/munich.
Serving
- Hugo genreated static files hosted on Firebase along with a Firebase-managed, Let’s Encrypt-backed SSL certificate.
- Previously:
- Jekyll generated static files hosted on Firebase along with a Firebase-managed, Let’s Encrypt-backed SSL certificate.
- Static files hosted on Amazon’s S3 bucket, served off a CloudFront distribution coupled with a free Amazon-provided SSL certificate.
- Static files hosted on Microsoft’s Windows Azure.
- Back to static hosting on Amazon’s S3.
- Static files hosted on Google’s App Engine.
- Static files hosted on Amazon’s S3.
- Nettigritty’s servers — they are a fantastic, affordable domain registrar and hosting provider. You should try them!
- Apache webserver.
DNS
- DNS is managed by cloudflare, fully passthrough.
- Previously
- Google Domains’s excellent DNS services.
- Namecheap.com’s DNS.
- DNS on Amazon’s Route 53 (did not need the super reliability of Route53 and saves mes $6 a year!).
- Gandi.net’s DNS servers.
- Nettigritty’s DNS servers.
Domain Registrar
- Domain registered with Namecheap.com.
- Previously:
- Google Domains is my current domain registrar.
- Namecheap.com as domain registrar.
- Gandi.net.
- Nettigritty.com.
- MelbourneIT (via Microsoft’s free website program via the now defunct Office Small Business program).
Miscellany
- Self hosted Git, with backups to Github, and Bitbucket.
- Previously: Visual Studio Online for versioning.
- Github & Google Code as CDNs.
- Comments are served out by Disqus.
- Syntax highlighting by highlightjs.
- Previously: Google Code hosted ‘Prettify’ JS library.
- Some jQuery aided javascript.
Acknowledgements
I instantly loved Ghost’s Dawn theme dawn.ghost.io’s visual aesthetic. In particular I was enamoured by the icon, and use it here on this site, pursuant to their MIT License as of this writing.
The look-and-feel of this website quite deliberately mirrors all that I admire from Ghost’s Dawn theme.