Hello from a new server

The most recent years this site was run of a Digital Ocean Droplet. A Droplet is their fancy name for a virtual private server (VPS) on shared hardware, but not anymore.

Generally I’ve been quite happy on Digital Ocean and they’ve provided a stable service through years. There was how ever a few things which caused an opportunity to move away.

• I was running on a 32bit OS, and needed to reinstall the Droplet to move to a current OS.
• They products and features offered by Digital Ocean seems to be more Corporate than my needs.
• While the price of 7.5 Euro a month for a server doesn’t seem that expensive, it’s been steady for years without any upgrades to CPU or memory.

Sourcing a few recommendations, welcome to the new server - again a VPS - hosted by Hetzner in Germany.

Switching to Hugo caused a major change in the workflow behind the site.

Wordpress comes with a full-featured backend which allows you to manage basically your entire website (if it’s Wordpress powered), but Hugo don’t. There’s no-backend admin site nor an webeditor to create and manage your posts. It doesn’t bother me. It’s a completely different workflow and I’m starting with a rough minimum flow initially untill I get a bit more expirence running Hugo.

Going from one CMS to another can be huge challenge - especially as I wanted the various pieces I’ve managed to bring along from the past 20 years along (content from the first years of the site is sadly lost over time).

Getting content out of Wordpress

Getting content out of Wordpress is quite easy. It has a built-in export function and while it took some time, resulting in a large zip file. As Wordpress powers huge parts of the Internet, the export format is well-understood and documented so it only to a little time to find a tool which could do a conversion from the Wordpress export to Marked which is what the Hugo CMS wants.

This site has been running for 20+ years. Most of the years I’ve been using wordpress to post occasionally and have fun messing around.

Wordpress have been a moving target and gained more features through the years. Far more than I ever needed, and to keep simple I’ve decided to move to a simpler setup using the HugoCMS.

Getting to here

One of the benefits of Hugo is, that it’s easy to have it running locally and rapidly let you see changes and update you make to hugo configuraion, themes and content - and I’ve even used it across Linux and MacOS during migation.

I’ve switched nameservers for all my domains yesterday. During the past many years I’ve been free-riding on GratisDNS and enjoying their free DNS service (and luckily never needed support in their forums).

Yesterday I switched to Cloudflare and I’m using them for DNS for this (and other domains). I don’t have any particular requirements, and the switch was mostly easy and automated to the extent possible. Two domains went smooth, but the last my mahler.io domain went a stray a few hours during the switch.

It’s been quiet here for a while, but be things have been happening behind the scenes. In case your wondering the site (and surroundings) have been seeing a number of updates which eventually may make it into separate posts.

• I’m running on a Digital Ocean droplet. It was provisioned as an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which is dead by now (as in no more updates including security updates). The server has now been roll up to an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in place.
• As I was messing around with the server, I’ve added IPv6 support.
• The DNS has been updated to have full support for DNSSEC.
• My Let’s Encrypt Certificates now has automated certificate renewals and I’ve upgraded to CAA support.
• The Webserver has been switched from Apache to NGINX.
• The PHP has been switched from PHP 5.6 series to a modern 7.0.
• I’m adopting full Git-backed backup of all server setup and configuration using BitBucket.org. It’s not complete but most config files have been added and managed using GitHub.

These was the majority of changes on the site and server the past few months. With these updates in place, I might get back to producing content for the site.

Let’s call it lift off… This site has been online in some form or another for 10+ years. During that time I’ve been runing a static HTML site (eventually with a few CGI’s), later on Movable Type a few years and most recently an odd mixture of Wordpress, Gallery2 and custom code. During the past months I’ve been trying to make things somewhat simpler, and what you’re looking at right now, is the first step - a new look (though a standard Wordpress theme and a drastically reduced plugin collection).

Welcome to a fresh look on netfactory.dk. I’ve never been quite satisfied with the old look, and stumbled across the WP_Premium theme which looked quite nice. It’s now live in a lightly hacked version.

Therre are quite a few things I’d like to hack further but in the spirit of the Internet Way of doing things, it’s probably best to release something slightly broken - and let updates happen “when I find the time”(tm).

A new wordpress has been released (2.6). I’ve upgraded - took 60 seconds and caused no issues what so ever (- so far anyway). There isn’t one big new thing, but a fair number of improvements in many different areas. Get the latest version from the Wordpress site.

It seems to be very modern to outsource thse days, and I’m trying to keep up. A while back I switched my RSS feeds from Wordpress Build-in services to FeedBurner. It was a win-win. Has a lot less load and feedburner does a lot of work to make sure the Feeds are in top-notch shape.

Yesterday another little change happended. All the website commenting were outsourced to Disqus. The signup procedure was a breze and they had a nice plugin available for wordpress making the switch a 5 second job. So far it seems to work well and once again the server hosting the website should have a smaller load in the future.