Changes

If you closely follow this site (which I doubt anyone actually does), you may have noticed some differnces to the theme and a bit of downtime yesterday. I'm making some changes to the site with the following goals in mind

• Save some money
• Reduce complexity
• Improve security

With these things in mind I've made the move to leave Ghost Pro They provide a wonderful service and I've had no complaints over the last few years I've been with them. In fact, they grandfathered me into an older (cheaper) personal plan, props to them. I still fully support them for the same reason Troy Hunt does. My site doesn't have nearly the traffic his does though and it can afford more downtime. Ghost Pro was overkill, and by self hosting, I'm saving ~$50 a year.

This does come with a bit more configuration on my side, but nothing that a couple hours of set, and maybe an hour of maintenance/upgrades a month won't handle. Still though, I don't want to be constantly maintaining a theme or updating custom plugins. So I'm sticking the the provided "Casper" theme from here on out. I've also lost Disqus for now. Hopefully I can bring it back on day, and the comments are still out there.

Lastly, on both the reduce complexity and improve security side, I've moved the site behind Cloudflare. SSL certs are now free/automatically applied and TLS best practices enforced. I'll be working on security headers in the coming weeks, but these will require some investigation.

There are a few downsides. I've broken some of the syntax highlighting that was previously being done with PrismJS. I'm going to try to review each post in the coming weeks and update out of date information, fix some of the markdown on the back end, and generally neaten up post settings. I'll also be doing a followup series detailing the setup and configuration of each component.