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Refreshed website

After surviving my first year teaching at UNB and coming out of a rejuvenating reading week, I thought it was finally time to get my website back up and running.

I'll fill in more details later, but I wanted to start by outlining how this site is hosted and created:

• The server (VPS) is rented from Digital Ocean who have always been an easy hosting solution. I've been running this server with them for more than a decade. In order to run Dokku (see next item) I upgraded it to have 2GB of RAM which is recommended and seems to function just fine.
• The server is running the Dokku PaaS software. This lets me run multiple service all on the save server and push changes via git very easily. I used to run all the services independantly, then I switched to docker (and docker compose). Dokku is a really nice solution for spinning up static sites, python apps, etc...
• This particular website is using the Eleventy static site generator. I'll try to write more about this in the future, I really like Eleventy, but it's flexibility can sometimes make it more daunting than it has to be.
• One small caveat: If you're hosting a static site on Dokku that has various files that suggest a nodejs app Dokku will automatically try to run npm. You can get around that by specifying the buildpack to use or in my case I just created a small Dockerfile in the root directory of the app which then takes precedence:

  FROM nginx:alpine
  COPY _site/ /usr/share/nginx/html