Can't have a website without talking about how it's made.

woord.baudvine.net is part of a larger effort to simplify my online infrastructure situation:

  • Disentangle baudvine.net from Google Workspaces.
  • Move stuff under a single domain.
  • Let go of the excellent dvanb.nl domain, which is more attached to my first name than I am.
  • Drop the VPS I'm not really using for anything but a static site no one reads.

Woord is hosted at nearlyfreespeech.net, one of the most stick-with-what-you-know services I've had the pleasure of using. NFSN provides hosting without a subscription fee, making you pay only for the resources you use - which works out beautifully for the "static site with five readers" scenario.

TLS certificates are provided by Let's Encrypt. I wrote about setting this up for Lighttpd before when I ran my own web server, but it's much simpler with NFSN: I logged in through SSH, ran a script that was already there, accepted some terms and conditions, and now woord.baudvine.net has HTTPS.

The site is cobbled together by Pelican, a static site generator that takes Markdown and ReStructuredText documents as input. I don't have to worry about the security woes of a dynamic site, and I get to type my stuff in the same markup language I'm already familiar with.

The theme is a modified version of the Sober theme. I fixed some bugs, and added some odds and ends like Open Graph tags and article translation links. I don't know a whole lot about typography & co so I'm not touching any of tat.

Generation and deployment is automated with a GitHub workflow, although I can just as easily run that from a local checkout. I try to avoid writing big CI scripts - the more I can debug without pushing to GitHub, the better.