I’d like to welcome everyone to my new website!

Why not Wordpress anymore? For one, I was on a free plan with no custom domain. I also found the Wordpress site in general to be pretty bloated (especially that new editor, yikes). I also didn’t need nearly any of the functionality that it offered.

I spent about a day yesterday experimenting with the Jekyll static site generator, and I found it enough to my liking to move my blog to it. Now, my workflow is just using vim to write normal Markdown files, which Jekyll compiles into a static website (plain HTML/CSS, minimal JS). I then simply scp that folder onto my webserver to deploy it. Clean and simple.

For DNS, I used Google Domains to reserve vincent-lee.net (I decided to follow the naming trend my two older sisters set).

For the server itself, I decided to be more daring. I’d heard about the OpenBSD project for quite a while and knew how they were focused on simple, clean, and secure systems. They had also recently written a whole new http server for OpenBSD 6.x, httpd. I decided to use Vultr to host an OpenBSD server, which I set up httpd on. The process itself was very painless, thanks to the BSD projects’ focus on excellent manpages. Afterwards, I set up Let’s Encrypt as well, another painless process involving less than 3 commands in total. The server runs extremely light, clocking in at 23 MB RAM used running only the firewall and web server.

Overall, it was a great educational experience, and here’s to a great life for this website!

PS: The theme is a slightly tweaked version of the default Jekyll theme. I’ll try to improve it soon, though aesthetics aren’t my forte.