Server cleanup, sourcehut, and general change

Previous state of the server

I’ll be honest: my server was a mess. I had quite a few things running, like a PrivateBin instance, ZNC for IRC, searx, discord_covid19, a lazy instance of a mail server, and some other things. For instance, I actually had no idea how ZNC was running: as a systemd service, in the background, docker, etc.?
So, eventually, I thought to myself: You have to clean this mess up sometime, preferably soon.

And so I did. About a week ago I took down PrivateBin (no one was using it and it didn’t seem useful to me anymore), ZNC (I’m barely ever on IRC anyways), and the mail server (big tech were blocking me for no reason anyways), among other things.
Honestly, it feels so refreshing. It started feeling cramped on my server as there was no structure, no rules about how to set anything up, not even something as simple as “everything will run as a systemd service”, and no directories for installation or users for instances were set up either. It was all just a mess of “I want this, let’s do it quickly so it’s running”, thinking I’ll clean up later. Alas, I never did.

With the server now feeling fresh again, essentially the only thing left running being my website, I’ll look into hosting different things again.
One of those things is soju, an IRC bouncer that’s supposed to be “user-friendly”, and that’s the impression I get, too. I’ll have to evaluate whether this is something I need, seeing as I barely ever use IRC (as stated above), and since soju is also running as a service on sourcehut for me to use instead.

Moving to sourcehut

Speaking of sourcehut, I’ve been moving my git repositories from the Microsoft owned GitHub to there, mostly because I still don’t feel like Microsoft is doing anything for the good of… anyone, but also just because it’s cool. Sourcehut feels fresh (maybe because it’s still in Alpha), minimalistic and, most importantly, avoids JavaScript. It feels fast and responsive, unlike GitHub.
Even better, sourcehut is completely open-source. This includes everything on the side, like the git instance as well as things like the build system.

But, one of the things I like most about sourcehut’s git philosophy is the choice by Drew DeVault to focus on E-Mail as a system for collaboration: There’s no need for accounts, you just submit a patch to an E-Mail address and you’ve contributed to your favourite project. No context switching for a pull request, no JavaScript to slow you down, just the good old E-Mail client of your choice and a little bit of what most people nowadays would almost certainly call git magic (read: patches in mbox format sent via E-Mail and applied via git am).

I like sourcehut so much that, even though I am a student and sourcehut is still in the free Alpha stage where no payment is required, I decided to pay for it. This is the kind of stuff we need to support.
This also opened up the possibility to use their build service. So I bit the bullet and decided to set up build instructions for my website, found here.
Never have I used automated builds for a project before and I gotta say, I’m very happy with the outcome. I just need to push my changes to the git repository, wait a few seconds, and my changes can be seen on my website. Just as I will with this post: After I’m done writing, I’ll simply push this to my repository and wait for the magic to happen.

Changes to the website

Something else I’m planning on doing is changing the website a little… again. I’m not satisfied with the wiki section at all. This would need a rework and right now I’m planning to merge blog posts and wiki entries into one category as my wiki entries could qualify as blog posts. To still have the small wiki entries be their own thing I’ll introduce tags for all my posts and only list actual blog entries in my blog, with the ability to find wiki entries with tags. Or something like that… We’ll see.

As I’m in the process of changing my whole E-Mail setup to have a wiredspace.de domain for the ability to easily switch providers in the future without much fuss expect to find a new E-Mail address to contact me at, along with a new PGP key (duh).

Shoutout to a good friend

You know who you are. To anyone else, feel free to take a peek at a friend’s posts. You can find his blog at https://rac-city.netlify.app/. He has been a huge motivation for a lot of stuff for me, including blog posts like this one. Thanks man, here’s to another year of being nerds.