It’s been on my To-do list to actually use my domain and setup my personal website for a while now. Having finally finished my degree and sorted a place to live that isn’t student digs, I’ve finally got some time to do go ahead and do so! Not completely sure how best to use it yet and what content to include, but some of my personal tech projects should hopefully make good (and useful) reading.

Hosting

I guess I can make a start by introducing the technology I’m using for this particular site. I’ve had a VPS with OVH for a couple of years now, and I’ve now created a “Public Cloud” instance specifically for my website hosting. It works in pretty much the same way as their VPS services do, but with more flexibility in being able to create new instances very quickly for flexible scaling and infrastructure creation. It also allows you to make your own private network between your server instances which can certainly be handy for service isolation without exposing back-end services to the open internet. At the moment they offer £25 free credit to get started, so it’s worth trying out now if you’ve never had a VPS before! Another thing I do like about OVH is they only charge a one-off activation fee of £1.70 per extra IPv4 address, as opposed to a recurring monthly cost that many other providers charge. Useful for service isolation and planning failover/backup access!

Jekyll

At university I was actively involved in our Hackathon Society HackSoc and those that built websites for the society always promoted the use of Jekyll for simple and rapid website building. GitHub Pages also provides built-in support for Jekyll which secured it’s use, as they offer free Jekyll web hosting and are of course massive supporters of the hackathon community! :) I’ve used it to create the site and I must say it’s been pretty intuitive and easy to work out, despite not having used Ruby too much before. I’m certainly glad I did it this way rather than code some inevitably unmaintainable HTML/CSS by hand. I think it’ll be a test of time whether Jekyll works for me and my workflow or not, or if I need (or maybe want :P) something more powerful like a full-blown CMS. I think the biggest potential limitation right now is the use of anything beyond the capabilities of Markdown. Not that I dislike markdown, I just feel it can be quite limited.

Anyway that’s all for now, as I carry on developing the website, you’ll notice things change (and maybe temporarily break :)) as much of the current structure is Jekyll’s default theming. I’m sure I’ll be changing the web server infrastructure a lot too!