Saturday, October 17, 2020

DasKunkee.net now live

One time when I was in high school, someone came to physics class with a package of 500 Post-It Notes. That same day, the teacher ended up needing to spend most of the hour away from us--no big deal, they're honors kids, right?

Well, someone got the bright idea to label everything in the room. First was the chalkboard, but "chalkboard" wouldn't do so it was dubbed "das chalkboard". As this group of kids circuited the room, more things were labelled "das <thing>" until they came to me. Being known by my last name, Kunkee, I was thereby dubbed "das Kunkee".

Later in high school, a friend offered to host a website for me. What to call it? DasKunkee.net.

It even had a subdomain served out of my parents' basement. The server and subsequently the subdomain were named for for the less-prosperous side of Terry Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork, Morpork. This was served on port 81 by an Intel 486 DX with, as I recall, 128 MB of RAM that ran Gentoo Linux and two 1GB SCSI-2 drives. (This is what happens when no one wants high-end spare parts from a decade ago.) I learned a lot from setting up and running it. One day I may salvage the files from it and set it up again.

Recently I got the bug to build something, so I resurrected the concept of this website: DasKunkee.net

You may notice that the styling is pretty simple. Back yonder when, the same friend kindly provided a simple set of PHP and CSS pieces that made it look awesome to my starry-eyed teenage self, and I've done my best to base the current design on it.

Of course, nowadays I'm a software engineer so some technical description is warranted. The site is stored in a GitHub repo as .pug files. Every push to main triggers a Github Action that turns the pug files into HTML and uploads them to Azure Storage. The Azure CDN then picks them up and serves them through the Azure Storage Static Website feature. (There are numerous tutorials about how to set this all up; I don't recall which ones I used, sorry.) The root SSL certificate comes from Let's Encrypt courtesy of shibayan's keyvault-acmebot (relevant blog post). ServerFault was decidedly less than helpful. For me it was a case of setting up the Static Website with one tutorial and figuring out that shibayan's work allows layering Let's Encrypt on top of that.

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