A new home on the web

I’ve been a member of SDF Public Access UNIX System for around fifteen years, at the ARPA level for most of that time. They provide a great service, and have hosted various incarnations of my homepage since I first signed up. The most recent was started in November of 2014 as a blog about programming, built with Jekyll and only lasting for a couple of posts (which I have copied over to this site). Then life got busier, and my blog fell by the wayside.

Since 2014, I’ve helped build a new product, went through a corporate acquisiton, started running (and stopped, and started again), bought a house, ran an old-school D&D-ish campaign (now on hiatus1), learned how to ski (sort of), quit Facebook,2 had my tenth wedding anniverary, rode in a hot air balloon, saw Iron Maiden live, played a lot of video games (most recently, Breath of the Wild), and grew and shaved off three beards. But I didn’t do much programming for fun, so I didn’t have a whole lot to write about for a site I’d named “A Programmer’s Homepage”.

Inside of a hot air balloon in flight.
Selfie on a mountain in a ski helmet.

Now it seems like a good time to start writing again, with a more general scope. Even though I still like SDF, and have no intention of cancelling my account there,3 I decided a couple of weeks ago that it was finally time to register my own domain, and find a host that provides easier deployments and some more bells and whistles. So I registered ingramj.net (and its .com counterpart) and looked at a few hosting and authoring options before settling on Netlify and Hugo. If you’re a developer, using them is dead simple. Put your site in a repo on one of the big Git hosting sites (I went with GitLab, but they also support GitHub and Bitbucket), and with a surprisingly small amount of configuration, you can deploy changes just by pushing to your master branch. It’s like GitHub pages, but with a lot more features, like one-click SSL certificates for custom domains, form handling, and preview deploys.

Now that I have a new home on the web, I have a few ideas that I’d like to write about. We’ll see how it goes.

  1. I learned that if you offer to run an RPG campaign at a software company, you’ll get a lot of takers. The largest session had a dozen players, two of whom were remote. It was fun, but crazy. ↩︎

  2. I was never going to top “When it comes to eating a lot of tacos, the trick is to get as many down as you can really quickly, before the self-loathing kicks in,” so it was time to move on. Also, it was really bumming me out. ↩︎

  3. I want to get a new t-shirt, since my old one wore out years ago. ↩︎