Website · 2017-10-26 · Daniel

A while ago, a friend suggested that I should start a blog. Around that same time, a coworker introduced me to DigitalOcean. I quickly set up a VM at DigitalOcean (that VM is serving this web page), and installed FreeBSD 11.

I looked at WordPress and other popular blogging tools, but all were overkill for what I want to do, and all would overtax the small VM I am running. I finally settled on Pelican, after a coworker showed me his blog.

I played around with all of the Pelican themes, and wanted one that would look good on all screen sizes, so it had to be a Bootstrap derivative.

I use a second FreeBSD system for the development version of this blog. That system is a VM running on my ESXi server. I develop and deploy there, then I deploy the production version here via rsync.

I won't get into the details of everything this VM does, but it functions as a:

  • Mail server, running Postfix + Dovecot + SpamAssassin + Sieve + Roundcube
  • Web server, running Apache serving a dozen or so virtual hosts, all of which use Let's Encrypt certificates