A long time ago, this site was powered by Joomla on a LAMP stack. This eventually evolved to what I called a "static Joomla" instance, where I ran a local LAMP stack in a virtual machine for content-creation, then
when I was ready to publish new content, I had a Python script I could run that would consume sitemap.xml to find
the site's content and generate the site as a set of static artifacts that could be hosted. This was great for several reasons:
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From the user's perspective, the site was a Joomla site, and would-be attackers had no idea it was a static site. This lead to a honeypot I operated from 2009 to 2011 to capture a lot of great username-password attacks on /admin.
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My hosting bill was considerably less since I wasn't running an online database.
The problem was that I had to run a virtual machine for content creation, and well...that virtual machine was corrupted at one point. This is why I stopped publishing for a bit. I also started asking why I couldn't go from version-controlled source to content online without a LAMP stack.
This and the fact that I had met someone who I believed at the time had an apititude for technology. I'm not going into details on that entire experience other than to say that I still believe this individual is smart enough to be a great technologist but unfortunately has chosen to listen to others and accept a lower standard of life. It is what it is. We all make our choices, but in the end this resulted in me taking down the site the person started and leaving this project idle until now.
This week, I took some time off work to use my accrued vacation and hack. Among the projects was to implement Jekyll and get this site published. Why? I've been publishing content to Linkedin. Why not just continue there? Honestly it's about ownership. If I publish here, I own my content. If I publish on Linkedin, they own that content. I'll probably publish to both, depending on the content. But there's another reason why. This site allows me to continue evolving my belief that information should be shared and open. I love to learn, and to help others to learn.
So, there's the story of the new site. I still have a lot of old content to consume, convert and upload over the next few weeks.
Happy Hacking!
Sam Caldwell