🧹Blog Housekeeping 2025

It's April 2025, over year since the last blog post!

Today, I spent a chunk of time migrating the blog to a new server, hosted on my old Macbook Pro. The reason? The homeserver system seemed be getting somewhat unstable over the past few years.

The Macbook now runs Xubuntu instead of its default macOS. It's not like I'm brewing up any iOS or macOS applications on a regular basis anyway.

I'm still happy with Docker and Docker Compose. They're extremely easy to lift and shift.

There was also a major hiccup with configuring e-mail services, however. That took a bunch of trial and error before resolving. It's always fun having to deal with SSL certificates!

This blog requires an e-mail based two-factor authentication to login as the owner. That's a shame, because I would have preferred a simple "time-based one time password" (TOTP) solution instead; and would avoid issues that arise when e-mail services are down. It looks like I might want to invest some of my own time to implement the TOTP solution myself because I get the impression that the main developers aren't interested in providing TOTP as an "out of the box" solution for the blogging platform. Oh well.

So why the housekeeping? To prepare the blog for new posts that I want to do while on vacation in May! 🌴 The old homeserver will also need some housekeeping, too. The idea is to have a number of different options for storing photos and videos as the trip progresses – with some redundancy in case any of the individual storage systems go offline. It isn't much, but, it will have to do.