This website functions as a personal blog, where I document whatever comes to mind. Here, I will be discussing many subjects involving my various interests and ongoing projects, on topics including technology, programming, music, art, travel, and my more down-to-earth IRL endeavors.
This website operates on a virtual machine on Google Cloud running a custom Alpine Linux image. It is served thanks to an Nginx reverse proxy on port 443. The virtual machine also hosts a WebSocket server on port 6969. That server program is being used to serve a separate project. You can view the progress on that project by visiting https://spells.lol.
The philosophy behind this design is cost-effective and smooth-operating, allowing me to operate two projects under one server. As such, I have two DNS A records pointing to the virtual machine’s public IP: blog.sylphyk.xyz and wasrvv1.spells.lol. Nginx is used to make a clear distinction between the two projects, allowing them to exist harmoniously. With my current Nginx configuration, blog.sylphyk.xyz points to this WordPress installation, and wasrvv1.spells.lol serves a 404. SSL certificates for both projects are automatically maintained by Certbot with the help of a cron job, scheduled to renew on the first Monday of each month. You can find more information on that project by visiting https://spells.lol/whitepaper. Interestingly, I am also able to connect via SSH to the VM using either [sub]domain.
This WordPress site uses the unpaid version of the “Yuki Cyber Blog” theme. It also uses a plugin called “WPCode Lite” to inject custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into the page. The free versions of both of these items do exactly what I need. This WordPress installation operates using MariaDB as the SQL server. And that’s it, that’s the tech stack for blog.sylphyk.xyz.
The purpose of this WordPress installation is to serve in the niche that WordPress is intended for: a blog, nothing more, nothing less. I am a purist, a shameless hipster, a fierce proponent of the KISS principle and Unix philosophy, and I prefer to build most of my applications from the ground up. That being said, however, I may still use this WordPress installation in the future to test out and learn plugins and configurations that would apply to my professional projects. For now, though, this is just a blog intended to be a space where I can ramble on about whatever is on my mind, in a space where anyone can come take a peek at the inner workings of my brain, and the WordPress content management system does that for me very well.