nicholas.cloud

Site

The inner workings of nicholas dot cloud

There’s a few more moving parts to my website than there were when I first made it years ago, so I’ve put this page together to cover all the pieces!

These are all the main parts that I can think of off the top of my head.

Acknowledgements

All content on this website is my own unless otherwise credited.

With that said, there’s a number of tools and services this website depends on. You can read more about them below.

There’s also several other resources that this site uses.

My thanks also go to Ruben Schade for his lovely blog design, which my own design is based on.

Writing and publishing content

Almost all content and code sits in a single Github repo.

I use the static site generator Hugo with a custom theme to build my website. It’s fast and meets my needs for templating/content management.

I like being able to write my posts locally in markdown. It’s easy to read and write, and whenever I need something more complex I can easily drop in custom HTML snippets.

As changes are pushed to Github, Buildkite schedules builds to be run. Good thing they have a free tier!

Serving incoming traffic

I currently run everything off a small DigitalOcean droplet. I configure and manage it with Terraform and Ansible. The code and playbooks for that live in a dedicated repository

I previously ran everything off an old Raspberry Pi model 1B on my home network, but I’ve retired it for now.

Web traffic is handled by Nginx. It makes serving static content a breeze, while still giving me a great deal of fliexibility. For example, my RSS feed is aliased to common paths (like /feed for Wordpress sites) to make it easier to find.

I also use Honeycomb to capture some telemetry about traffic to my website. It’s useful for seeing if there’s

Domain management

I originally called nchlswhttkr.com my home, but later moved. While “Nicholas Whittaker with no vowels” sounds good in my head, it becomes problematic when someone else had to type it out. I use a Cloudflare Worker to redirect to my new website, because I try to avoid link rot.

Both this old domain and my current domain, nicholas.cloud, are registered with Porkbun. I’ve been very happy with them so far for their pricing and customer support.

The nameservers for both domains are with Cloudflare, because it’s easier to manage DNS records when my traffic is proxied through their network. The added benefit of caching is nice too, though I get a negligible amount of traffic.

My main reason for using Cloudflare is Cloudflare Workers, which are great when I need a little more than what a purely static website offers. If you’d like to see a few more things that are possible with Cloudflare Workers, I’ve written a couple of blog posts about uses I’ve found for them. Hooray for serverless!