My entire homepage consists out of static pages. At first there was a Ruby on Rails CMS doing the heavy lifting, but I am quite lazy so there are almost no updates. I found it therefore unnecessary to have a full-blown database-backed CMS generating pages and wasting resources (and taking care of everything as well). In a thread on the OpenBSD mailing list this topic came up and somebody recommended the Template-Toolkit, a Perl based framework to generate static HTML files. It worked reliable but required some dirty hacking to get it working as I wanted.

When I lost my source files, boya introduced me to Jekyll and I migrated that what was left of my homepage. Jekyll is based on Ruby and has native support for blog posts. The categories and tag pages for the blog are created using my own plugins based on the Jekyll plugin by Dave Perrett.

I use Vim to edit the files and git to store them. After jekyll built the static pages, they are uploaded to the webserver running Nginx via rsync. The whole process is automated with a small script.

I use the Source Pro font family by Adobe Systems Incorporated. It comes in three flavors: Source Code Pro, Source Serif Pro, and Source Sans Pro. All of them are available under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

Security and stuff

I use Let’s Encrypt to create SSL certificates for my services. Their root certificate is cross-signed and trusted by Mozilla and thus included in many browsers. If not, you can download it from over here.

Want to know more? Just contact me and ask! Its free!