I’ve been looking at the video tutorials on Linode and they’re really good now, a raft of new tutorials over the last month or so has really picked up my knowledge on hosting and toughening security.

This was so easy but makes a lot of sense, so long as I now never lose my SSH key my site should be a lot more secure.

This is great – I use a 1GB Nanode for my NC instance but this means I now have 250GB storage and 1TB of transfer just by hosting the files on Object Storage instead. Awesome! It’s more space and transfer than I will ever need but I suppose that’s the best part – I also wont ever be going over my allowances and that’s good peace of mind.

Linode is awesome 🙂

So I use WordPress here, and WordPress gets a lot of flack for being bloated with plugins, speed being crap, security being rubbish etc. I’ve been playing with Ghost CMS on the side and it is so incredibly limited. The admin backend has very few options, the expectation is that you’re going to have a lot of background in modern coding to get it running with some kind of third party coding software to tweak till you’re happy.

Thats great, if you want to do that. I don’t.

This really is a site that looks great, to me, works great, for me, has a lot of customisation features that I enjoy and it ‘just works’.

It’s old and bloated, but so am I. I keep the plugins to a minimum and the site is always up to date from a backend standpoint. Linode’s hosting is great and they keep the VM up to date, I just don’t see what the problem is. Ghost is really quick, uses modern json which I’m sure if I spent a few months going through tutorials and online classes I could get the hang of. But that really seems like soooo much work that I don’t need to do with WordPress.

So, if you want to use Ghost or anything else and you love it, great, if you want to use WordPress and love it, great. Just don’t be such a fucking cunt about it, k?

🙂

I really just felt compelled to write something because this is a website that costs money and I havent added anything in ages.

Covid, urgh, work, urgh, family, urgh, relationships, urgh, etc… its just all urgh. This year has been a complete dumpster fire but on the other hand I know Im lucky to still have everyone around me who matters, to be employed and still have my physical health even though my mental health is shot.

My life is basically 50% work, 25% sleep and 25% either being so tired I wish I was back to sleep or just drinking to either forget or remember. Its not good. The hope is that next year will be better once the vaccine comes out and hopefully doesnt turn us all into horrible zombie mutants or give us chronic illnesses later in life.

Nothing much is going on, its really just the grind until Xmas and getting that over with, then kicking off the new year and hope it’s better than this one.

If anyone actually visits and reads this, stay safe.

Also, I really like this picture, its really nerdy.

I thought it might have even been Scottish it was so strong!

It tastes like a rusty minge. Do not approve.

I should have taken a picture of the Old J that I had last weekend, but I approve very much of the Kraken. Its a much different feeling experience than bourbon. It seems to be a much quicker advancement in the change of perception and the ability to spell things correctly while typing… The taste isnt as sweet, its a bit liquorice~y but the bitter component, and nothing else. Yeah. Will continue to explore as I make my way through the bottle. Which is quite pretty.

What a week. Work is work, it’s official. With no lottery win in sight I have to say it’s the daily grind all over again. A few small mods to the website layout and design but I’m a bit happier with it.

I’ve been messing around with emulators and trying to find the best handheld for emulation – I’ve tested PSP, 3DS, Switch and mobile, and tbh they are all a bit lacking. I’ve picked up a PS Vita from eBay as there’s a lot of good press that it’s supposed to be the best so we will see!

My life is uninteresting, so expect uninteresting posts 🙂

The captive screws on the 3DS are officially dead… sigh…

Yeah this site doesnt have a title because it messes with the formatting of the index page. If I add a title in the index.php then I cant post images.

Meh, after everything it took to get this far, name the site what you want! I’m sure it wont be any more rude than what I have been calling it recently….

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I started out this week moving this blog from Godaddy, basically because after your first ‘cheap’ year, the cost was going to ramp up to £60 for the luxury of the domain name, more than £100 up front for hosting charges and £50 for an email address. I wasnt happy! I already have email, I would have liked to have kept the domain name but the hosting prices and it all rolled into one was just more than I was willing to pay for a website that I rarely update or even look at. This is just a hobby tinkering website at the end of the day.

So I thought, well, I have my Unraid server, it cant be that difficult to host WordPress myself, right? And it wasnt, not really. There were a few things I had to learn – I already had LetsEncrypt setup, as well as DuckDNS for my Nextcloud server, so it wasnt too much of a stress to get WordPress set up.

However, this is where the paranoia set in – I really want as little (ideally nothing) on my personal home storage server to be public facing and accessible. To me, that just seems like asking for trouble.

I’d heard of Linode through various Youtubers but never really took the time to log in and make an account – I thought Id just give it a try and see what it was like, there’s currently a 60 day $100 credit promotion at the moment and even though I thought I’d never be able to get it working, well, here we are! 🙂

I have basically removed everything from Godaddy, my domain is now with Google domains which is £10 a year (saving £50 straight away!), this hosting is $5 a month, but free for two months through the promotion, and I’m moving Nextcloud to Linode also to host all my images and files and give me ‘cloud access’ via the mobile app on my iPhone – so nothing is now public facing on my server. Should I feel differently in 2 months time when the linode promotion ends, I can spin my server back up and have everything I need in an instant, and that’s reassurance that money cant (well, obviously it can) buy.

The site is certainly more responsive. I’ve opted for the basic Nanode 1GB, 1 core setup for $5 a month, but scaling should be easy and it’s basically very inexpensive as the subscription is rolling with no upfront costs. Class 🙂

Thought of the day: Stress can be overcome with money, or alcohol, or love. If you can’t get over the stress, try applying one of these three things and just watch it melt away. Maybe.