Welcome to my new site; it’s not a new url, but everything’s been rebuilt from the ground up.
Well… I say it’s been rebuilt, but that’s not quite true yet. It’s in the process of being rebuilt as of this posting, more accurately. I haven’t migrated over any content, and I haven’t even finished configuring the bells and whistles I’d like to have.
That’s okay; I can live with it.
The real question is: why?
Well, for one thing, the url itself is a concern. I had hosted Enigmastation.com on OpenShift for a while, for various reasons: it meant I wasn’t having to worry about administrating the installation, speed was better than it had been on the previous host, and since I work for Red Hat, it meant I was more or less using my company’s own services. One side-effect of using OpenShift, though, is that your URL access is modified; I couldn’t access the site via “enigmastation.com,” but had to use “www.enigmastation.com,” which meant installing an HTTP redirect on the base url, which never quite seemed to work correctly.
For another, I run a few different sites, largely hobbyist installations, things that interest me. One is still on the original enigmastation.com host; enigmastation.com itself was on OpenShift, I have another application on OpenShift, and there’s another idea I’ve been kicking around, to be created as soon as I have a decent domain name. It’s too many locations to remember for my tiny brain. I needed to consolidate, and the step of consolidation gives me a natural demarcation point at which to begin again.
So what is it?
Glad you asked! This site is a fairly straightforward installation of WordPress, on a fairly small VPS hosted by RamNode. I’m using nginx as the webserver, and MariaDB as the backend database. Just to make things easy on myself, the WordPress instance is a “single-site” deployment; the other sites will be, too, since I plan to customize how they work.
So far, I have a fairly simple deployment; I’m using Thesis for the theme, and the JetPack plugin for Markdown support along with a few other useful goodies. That’s … about it.
I’d rather have AsciiDoctor support than Markdown, but so far AsciiDoc support under WordPress is pretty lacking, from the looks of it. For that matter, even Markdown support isn’t perfect; there’re places where I have to make sure the generated HTML is correct, and manually enter it when it’s not.
So now what?
Well, my first step is to get this blog up and running again, with the bits and pieces attached that I want, and the look and feel with which I’m comfortable.
Then I’m going to start adding content back in, preserving those things that I think are of value; stories, poems, articles of merit about my field, some commentary I want to preserve for posterity (even if I’m the only one to whom those things matter).
Along the way, I’m going to try to force myself to write more often.