About this Website

May 31, 2020

This site is intended to be simple, easy to add content to, close to html/css, and reliable. The domain name and web server are both provided by Digital Ocean’s $5/month droplet. This is a small virtual server that can run different operating systems, this one is running Ubuntu 18.04.

I’m using nginx as the web server, the instructions I followed are here. I have it configured to serve the files for this website out of my home directory so that I can version control the folder. All of the content is bare html, I’m choosing for now to avoid using even a lightweight static file generator. I find that I forget how it’s configured and there’s too much overhead. It’s easy enough to work with the bare html. All this leads to the entire site loading less than two seconds, and an almost-perfect 99 on Google PageSpeed Insights.

It is useful to configure Server Side Includes which allows you to “template” your html. For example, I have my header in a separate header.html which is included by adding a #include into the html. This allows me to easily maintain the boilerplate of the website. There’s also settable variables, so I can define the page name variable in the file and it will be picked up and set the title tag appropriately.

I am using normalize.css to reset browsers inconsistencies. Most of the styling comes from sakura.css, though I’ve changed a few small things.