gkbrk.com is my personal blog, website and web server for various purposes. Almost all my writing is contained here, with the exception of my old websites and things I’ve published anonymously or under a psudeonym.
On this page you will find some technical and historical information regarding my website.
Current setup
gkbrk.com is currently a static website built using Jekyll. The pages are mostly written in Markdown, with some org-mode and plain-text files thrown in.
Some dynamic functionality is provided by CGI scripts and serverless functions.
The pages are hosted on BunnyCDN. A cron job spawns a VM every day that fetches the logs from the CDN and puts them on longer-term storage.
Previously
gkbrk.com is a static website, built using Jekyll. The articles are written mostly in Markdown, with some org-mode files thrown in.
It is deployed automatically by my build server. On each build request; a fresh VM spins up, installs all the tools and dependencies needed for the build, generates the html files and uploads it to my web host using rsync. After this, the VM is terminated and deleted.
My hosting provider is NearlyFreeSpeech. I don’t have any problems with them so far, they seem to be a solid host.
Blog
The blog is pretty self-explanatory. I occasionally write stuff, people who follow me see it. Sometimes it gets posted to various syndication services. It is also followed via my RSS feed. I have comments that work with a CGI script I wrote; meaning that even if my website gets overloaded enough to make my comments stop loading, the main content should still load easily.
Wiki
The wiki is where I store notes, ideas, unfinished articles and pieces of information not suited to blog posts. Instead of being chronologically ordered, they are listed alphabetically on /wiki.
CGI
Any dynamic functionality on my website (like comments), and personal scripts I use are CGI scripts. Most people will laugh at CGI scripts, calling them ancient, and then happily over-pay for serverless functions that are essentially CGI scripts on the cloud.
Previously
In the past, my website was using the Hugo static website generator. While I was happy with the speed and the static binary aspect, the fact that it was near impossible to use a programming (not templating) language without having to patch the source code is what made me switch to Middleman.
Around this time my website was hosted on Amazon AWS, their S3 service to be precise. The pricing and speed of S3 was very satisfactory, my move to NearlyFreeSpeech was mostly about making a point of using smaller providers in order to keep the web healthy and diverse.
Previously
Before that, my website was hosted on DigitalOcean. It consisted of two parts. A hand-written static website generator for my wiki and a Python application written using the bottle.py framework for my main website.
At some point, I also had a hand-written blog script in Python. But I don’t remember how that tied into the rest of my website. Most likely, that was the main website along with a wiki.
