SecondForge

A few weeks ago, one of the WordPress installations that lives on my personal Amazon EC2 micro server was hacked, and my server became a (very slow, ineffective) part of a DDoS botnet. I took the server down immediately, but decided that running WordPress for my simple site was silly.

This site (at least before the weeks of downtime) received no more than 2 or 3 visitors per day, maximum. The Micro sever is slow enough that I had to install page caching to get reasonable performance anyway. So why have a CPU idling 24x7 in the cloud just to fetch a bit of HTML out of memory three times a day?

So, the website you see now is created with octopress. I’m quite happy with it so far, though I did have a little bit of trouble modifying the slash theme to colors I prefer.

Other than zero sever maitenance, the real benefit of this so far is that I can store my blog in a git repository! Version controlling prose is one of the world’s great hacks in my opinion. Once one starts (in my case with LaTeX for academic work), it is hard to go back.

I will attempt to get some of the old posts back up with URL redirects at some point.