Introducing: this site!

Social media is a bummer, so I shout into the Web using this site instead.

Goals

I maintained a slightly less minimalist blog built on Pico CMS for a few years, and decided I wanted to move operations to a new site that would incorporate improvements I’d been wanting to make. They were:

• Running a website on a platform I find easier to administer (FreeBSD instead of Ubuntu)
• Automating deployment using Terraform and Ansible
• Reducing dependencies (more below)
• Reducing attack surface (more below)
• Improving version control

At the same time, I wanted to learn more about:

• Delivering services in a Unix-like environment
• HTML
• Terraform
• Ansible

I wound up inadvertently learning more about:

• Git (never, ever make a commit of a net-new thing and try to “back it out” with git reset --hard)

Design

This site is put together by essentially writing my own CMS using Markdown, shell and Python scripts, and Ansible. The workflow for creating new content is:

• Write a page’s content in Markdown and save it in a hierarchy that’s a draft of the webroot on the production web server.
• Commit the new file to a git repository.
• Run an Ansible playbook that:
  • Runs a shell script over the draft webroot to create a production hierarchy, where all Markdown files have been converted to HTML using Multimarkdown.
  • Formats all of the HTML files in the production hierarchy using a Python script.
  • Copies the production hierarchy to the web server.

This design obviously doesn’t scale well, as re-generating and copying all content for a big, fancy, commerical web site would be time-consuming and error-prone. But, at the scale of this website, it’s:

• Easy to deploy in its entirety and with the same process used to deploy new content.
• Easier to keep patched, as I don’t have as much code running.
• A smaller attack surface, as I don’t have as much code running.

I could have opted to build all the site’s content locally and deploy it to an S3 bucket. That would eliminate the need for managing a platform, web server, and transport security layer all together. As those things are of personal and professional interest, though, that seemed too easy.

Lessons Learned

• Discovered the headache of HTML entity codes. This happened when I found that HTML that came out of my Markdown file -> Multimarkdown -> HTML file -> BeautifulSoup -> HTML file pipeline contained a munged apostrophe (“'”) in it. The work-around was to grab a string-version of a BeautifulSoup object, perform a re.sub() on it to add the header I wanted, convert it back into BeautifulSoup, then write it out as a byte-encoded string with f.write(soup.encode('latin-1')).

• Renewed my appreciation for atomic operations. Ansible’s idempotent approach to things is great, but you run into trouble when your remote directory structure has files in it that you’ve deleted in your local copy.

• Having an off-the-shelf CMS is really convenient! Much of the point of this exercise was to learn how much of a chore it is to run a website. Mission accomplished.