• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Will Angley

Just another WordPress site

  • About
  • Photos
  • Words
  • Resume
  • Contact

Not-running a server cost me more than running a server ever has

November 7, 2020 by Will Angley

willangley.org, and some short-lived predecessor blogs, ran without a server for about a decade total: intermittently between 2004 and 2009, and then steadily from 2014 through the middle of 2019. Most of this time was spent running as a static site with Jekyll on GitHub Pages.

I really enjoyed writing in Markdown. Sublime Text is a great Markdown editor; Marked 2 is a great Markdown previewer. You can get a lot of writing done quickly. And the environment really does make it easier to concentrate by hiding formatting controls away.

But I hit a wall almost as soon as I wanted to share something that wasn’t writing.

Hitting a wall

I’d picked up an old Pentax K1000 and started taking photos on film in 2015, and by 2018 I had several albums that my friends had enjoyed seeing in person and I wanted to share with the world.

In September 2018 I spent three days putting an image gallery on my site to share the photos for one roll of film, and was incredibly frustrated at the end.

I had no idea how to extend Jekyll, since I had never learned Ruby. I thought “well, let’s switch to something I can extend,” and knew Go, so I spent two days migrating my site to Hugo on essentially a reflex.

This was a bad decision, and although I didn’t realize it, it was documented as such at the time. I spent the third day in a tarpit of slow thumbnail rebuilds as I kludged together a {{< gallery >}} shortcode to scale my scanned photos down to thumbnails and show them as a film strip.

I checked in the images, realized I was going to run out of room in the GitHub repo that held my site if I shot a roll of film every weekend for nine months, and then put off dealing with it until spring 2019.

Searching for something better

I spent a long time looking in Spring 2019, and ran down a lot of dead ends: letting myself have ideas about things I wanted, not writing them down, trying an approach that might fulfill one idea, and then realizing I’d hedged myself out of another thing I wanted.

I talked to some very smart engineers at Google as I was looking, and it didn’t help; we’d all read the same things that had steered us wrong.

Solving my problem

I got out of this by talking to different people, who I knew from outside of work, and who made websites for a living. They used WordPress.

It was hard to get myself to try this, because it’s got tons of what Silicon Valley culture doesn’t like in a program. It’s 20 years old, complicated, made of PHP, and you need to run a server to use it. And I’d personally spent some years saying “friends don’t let friends run WordPress,” after helping recover a hacked WordPress site and move it to Squarespace.

I was wrong to repeat that. Even if I couldn’t teach someone how to run their small business from WordPress in 2014, I might be able to learn enough to run my personal website in 2019. And not trying it was feeling increasingly like a mistake of values – like not making a painting because someone might rip the canvas.

I found a guide on Hosting WordPress Yourself that looked reasonable, and it worked.

When I got stuck theming the website, I asked my friend what they did for that. I was a little surprised by their answer, so I asked at the local WordPress meetup‘s help desk, and they said the same thing: use the Genesis Framework. So I did.

That worked too. Even though I hadn’t written PHP for 10 years, I was able to finish theming my site within a day.

Retrospective

I caught up on all of the photo albums I was sitting on and then some, and my site’s been running smoothly ever since: downtime monitoring says my site’s gone down for an hour and a half of downtime in a year and a half of running, so I’m north of 99.9% uptime.

There’ve been a few kinks, mostly in the spaces I know I didn’t quite follow the guides that I was working from; now that my server is prompting me to upgrade it I need to figure out what I did, write it down, and get ready to build it again.

But even with that, not-running a server cost me more than running a server ever has.

Filed Under: Words

About the Author

Will Angley likes to take photos, and pays the bills by writing code for a big company.

Never miss a post!

By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time :).

Primary Sidebar

Follow me

  • GitHub
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Top Posts

  • How I set up Tailscale on my WiFi router

Recent Posts

  • 🗽Statue of Liberty
  • Sunsets are back!
  • Marking myself out of a corner
  • Incident of the day: Bonobos
  • Why does installing Wi-Fi still involve knocking holes in walls?

Categories

  • Photos
  • Words

Copyright © 2014–2023 Will Angley · Privacy Policy · Made with ❤️ and WordPress in NYC