New Tech
The site is now built on Hugo, a static web site generator built in Go, which has taken me quite a bit of hassle to get setup up and content switched over, but is now working more or less, though I’ll be working on this a bit more to tune it into shape. It’s a big change from the previous Movable Type setup, but quite necessary, now that Movable Type has decided to go bankrupt. Just kidding, but clearly they are no longer interested in the little guy. Just the intro license is about $700 USD. So it was time to move on, and this looks like a great, very fast alternative. Hopefully this new version is a fair bit more responsive too, both in the sense of running very quickly and adapting to phones, tablets, etc.
Security
I have also set up https by default, though at the moment, that doesn’t probably matter all that much. As a general principle though, I want to support encryption throughout the web. Between greedy ISPs inserting ads into their customers’ pages and snooping governments, it seems like now is the time. Hopefully this will become wider spread. Mozilla is working on a plan to support automatically generated SSL certificates, and the fact that faster pipelined web serving, in the form of HTTP/2, only supports encrypted transport means that I think eventually it will become the standard.
Also, the fact that this site is now created using a static site generator means that there just isn’t as big of an attack vector to exploit. There’s no database and no server side code execution when a page is loaded. That means a great deal to me as it’s a lot less hassle to maintain, and there’s less of a chance of a good hacking. One of the sites that I maintain was recently hacked, and it’s a hassle to clean up after that’s happened.
Lastly, I am pleased to see that my host now supports IPv6, which I have now enabled for this site. This is admittedly not yet widespread, but it is the future of the internet. Eventually, with IPv4 addresses running out (ARIN has very few left), many users will only be able to use IPv6. That’s not a bad thing, as it comes with a host of improvements beyond just addressing the address space issue, like native support for IPSec and better routing.