As one can surely see, I’ve found myself at the point of this endeavor where I’m forced (by myself, of course) to create a blog post. For one does not simply host a blog without at least one blog post. But, what to post about? Most blogs start with some form of introduction, I imagine, just as most shows start with a pilot, whether or not they have anything to do with proper aircraft operation. At risk of becoming overly mundane by following the trend, I suppose then I’ll start with the stack for this particular site.
I’m trying out Cloudflare pages a little more seriously. For many years I primarily hosted sites through a BAMP stack — or, a FAMP stack, depending on your preferred nomenclature. That is, a FreeBSD + Apache + MariaDB + PHP setup. This seemed, for a while, to be the most appropriate setup for your common site that you might otherwise host on some VPS or webhosting site. I think the first CMS that I toyed with was Drupal, so the *AMP stacks were fairly intuitive. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (supposedly). Though as time went on and microframeworks became more popular, I found myself adding other technologies like HAProxy to route HTTP traffic for Java daemons or whatnot.
But for several years now Cloudflare seems to have added to its platform a fairly robust set of tools to manage sites without really needing in-house infrastructure. And there are some ethical concerns with this, of course—I’ll almost certainly rant about the quasi-centralized nature of the internet at some point, as an example. But it does seem to be prudent to at the very least become familiar with “serverless” hosting as folks move closer to being fully on the public cloud. And, so long as Cloudflare’s free offering remains, well, free… it’s economically appropriate for a silly little site such as this.
For this site, my confession is that I generally dislike web development, for reasons that I will probably rant about later as well (please take note that rants will be a running gag on this blog; there will be a quiz on them after class). API development—I can get behind that. But smarter people than I really have a thing for UI/UX (I don’t kink shame) and quite frankly I’m happy to let them have that one. So I’ve used Astro for the technology and, at the time of the writing of this blog, I’m using Astrofolio for the theme. So far, I think I like it.
Is that a good enough intro? If not, please reach out to my agent.