Last weekend I spent several hours reorganizing this little server and puzzling through how to run Wordpress and nginx in containers in exactly the way I wanted. Several days later, the PHP2Shell vulnerability went viral. 🤦

I hurriedly migrated Wordpress to this static site, in spite of the fact that it meant I did all that containerization work for nothing. (I learned a lot about podman, at least.) This site is now built using Astro which is working out quite nicely. The most secure way to run PHP, after all, is to not run it at all.

Glancing over 19 years’ (!) worth of posts made me reflective. Many of the posts here are about very niche issues I encountered with software and the solutions I came up with. I wrote them with the hope that they would help someone, and indeed, people found the posts through google and left a word of thanks in the comments or some additional helpful information. I always enjoyed that, and I’ll be giving some thought to how I might implement a comment system with this new static site.

Over the years, I’ve also done a fair amount of pontificating about technology trends. There’s a certain tone one assumes when writing in public, but let’s be honest, no one cares what I have to say about these topics. Except me! The posts have been been a valuable record of the different places my attention has roamed over time. It’s one of the main reasons I wanted to keep all this content instead of just nuking it.

With social media platforms like Bluesky, blogs feel like a relic of bygone times. AI is becoming an intermediary for search, which means obscure blogs will get even less direct traffic. That’s okay. It’s still fun to homestead a little piece of the web for yourself, if for no one else.

It’s worthwhile as long as it keeps you learning and growing.