blog

new blog forwarding

Following the previous post for migrating blogs, it turns out it is very easy in apache to simply redirect a whole website:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^strangeparty.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.strangeparty.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ https://www.antonpiatek.dev/$1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

And now an old url, such as https://www.strangeparty.com/2016/08/22/now-with-added-ssl-fromletsencrypt/ will simply work on the new host as the pages are in the same location

New blog

I’ve been meaning to move away from wordpress for years. I don’t use anything fancy on it, and a static site is both safer to host as can’t really get hacked and doesn’t need patching, as well as being potentially easier to host.

To this end, I’ve moved to Jekyll as it has an easy export from wordpress and can be hosted by github pages quite easily and therefore hosted very easily (including custom domains).

Comments in this case are via Gisgus, thanks to @calanais for suggesting this option.

The move would have been a lot easier had I not tried to several years ago and then ignored it, as it turns out that having old files from old themes checked in is quite a pain and overwrites all your new themes, and causes hours of debugging…

I’m sure there’s loads more to fix up on this, but for now I’ve got what I wanted - something I can easily add posts to, not have to worry about security, and migrates my old posts. Old comments are lost, but probably not really of much interest.

One other thing I wanted to acheieve in the move was preserving all old blog urls, and you can setup the posts to reflect the same wordpress url layout, so I’m hoping I can simply write an apache redirect url pattern to forward to me new blog domain

Now with added SSL from letsencrypt

I’ve had SSL available on my site for some time using startssl, but as the certificate was expiring and requires manual renewal, I though it was time to try out letsencrypt. I’m a huge fan of the idea of letsencrypt, which is trying to bring free SSL encryption to the whole of the internet, in particular all the smaller sites who might not have the expertise to roll out SSL or where a cost might be restrictive.

There are a lot of scripts for powering letsencrypt, but getssl looked the best fit for my use case as I just wanted a simple script to generate certificates, not manage apache configs or anything else. It seems to do a pretty good job so far. I swapped over the certificates to the newly generated ones and it seems pretty smooth sailing.