Setting up this blog
First post! I'm just going to detail some of the stuff I went through to get this blog set up. I am writing this at 5AM, so read with caution.
I've had the rkevin.ddns.net domain for literal ages, using No-IP's free DDNS servive, and it has been good enough for all my uses.
That said, playing around with subdomains sounds like fun so I've always considered getting a proper domain name. My procrastination friends convinced me to
take a look at some domains, so I did.
I originally tried to get something like rk.tld but "rk" is way too short so it costs a lot of money (like, 5 digit expensive) so I ditched that idea.
(Also, apparantly rk.com is a porn site. Guess how I found out.) rkevin.dev is available for pretty cheap on Porkbun, so I snagged it.
Next step is to get a HTTPS certificate. I've been using certbot for ages and it has worked really well. That said, I'd like to get a
certificate for *.rkevin.dev, which requires putting a DNS TXT record up to prove I own the domain. I'd also like to use the same certificate for my old domain name,
which I don't control the DNS for so I have to use HTTP challenges as well. After a while of poking around I found the --manual flag allows me to setup all the
challenges manually and thus be able to get the certificate. I used
sudo certbot certonly -d [list of domain names] --preferred-challenges http,dns --manual to get my certificate. The preferred-challenges option makes it prefer
HTTP for everything except the wildcard domain, which falls back to DNS authentication. I need to think of a way to automate this from now on, because I used to have
certbot running on a cronjob that automatically renews the certificate, but I need to manually add the TXT record from now on. I'll hopefully think of something.
As for the content, this blog is generated using makesite, which allows me to generate this static site using a bunch of markdown files. I should've probably used something like Jekyll but I already have Python on my server and it seems more convenient. I'm not doing anything fancy, so no need to use a CMS that needs updating and patching and all that.
The markdown is transformed into HTML using mistune, with some custom changes to allow Discord style markdown,
with its fancy underscores and italics that aren't possible with normal markdown. This way, I can abuse markdown to burn your eyeballs with my
shitty humor *ahem* make my content more readable.
I think that's all for now. I'll start populating the about and contact pages now. Let me know if I'm "blogging" right, or is this just too incoherent a format to be acceptable. Anyways, more content comming soon! (S∞n...)