Website Design Philosophy!

Why not use a CMS?

Back when I started in Information Technology before I got into Information Security, I worked in a small data center where Wordpress and Joomla were very commmon. In that prior environment I became used to designing and engineering websites using a CMS (Content Management System) thus, my original website ran Wordpress. I found wordpress to be very cumbersome to maintain over the many years of running my original website though I will admit it is a very easy to use platform. Running a CMS adds quite a bit of attack surface that I personally don't want to have right now.

Why Don't I Use a Static Site Generator?

While using a static site generator sure would be easier than writing raw HTML, CSS, and a little bit of PHP I don't see a purpose in having something translate Markdown into the aforementioned components. Especially when I can build this site myself and learn some new things along the way! Worse case scenario I end up moving over to one if the long-term maintenance of this site becomes too much of a hassle.

Why Is This Server Running Arch Linux?

Despite the meme (I use Arch, btw) I find running Arch on a webserver to be a pretty lean system thus far. I didn't want to make things too hard on myself by running something like Gentoo even though it has been recommended to me in the past. So far this VPS (Virtual Private Server) has been fairly stable, but we'll see over the long run! Plus, there are some security benefits to running a lean system on the back end. I may be open to running this site on OpenBSD or Slackware in the future. If I moved to OpenBSD, I'd likely have to move VPS hosting providers as Linode doesn't support it at the time of writing.

Final Thoughts.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this site has turned out! It's in keeping with my push towards minimalism from a technological perspective and the attack surface is pretty limited thus far. This website may not be the most feature rich or pleasing to the aesthetically inclined among us, but it does show I can do fine with less frills! It'll be interesting to see how this site develops over time.