A little tech stuff here

This 2020 site is surrounded by both feelings:

Pride. I am a “kind of experienced” coder and sysadmin. Yes, I am a silent film pianist and graduated as a concert pianist but, I do computers since I was 8 (do the math).

I even helped financing my first silent film international performances paying my bills and beer with lines of code (better don’t do that math). Pride, is giving myself this huge time slot to populate a website doing my own writing, sysadmin and programming.

Shame. It comes pretty late: 22 years after I began. Never did I have an on-line place to drop my career news and bio and tons of evidences may be probably lost. Yes, I did have blog.joseserralde.org but, that was very millennial-random-stuff to catch some “readers”.

So, this is a note about all that free software powering this new effort. Hope you can probably use it to code your own website, or hire a nice coding person to leave your system and website’s look-and-feel ready for business.

I hired a host

…where I could install and admin my own server. I did this many, many times for cultural projects and HUGE festivals, and it feels amazing to do it for my own career. But I was a little cautious. As I needed to choose “someone elses computers” as host, I solely chose among companies openly declaring privacy awareness. Not a perfect choice, but sufficient.

I installed a web server

I use Nginx. Nice web server software whose deepest tacit rationale is: being easier and faster to secure than Apache, the popular guy. I love it. Though, it is common to hire a host offering this done.

I installed a content management system

I use Pelican as a CMS software. Why? No complex requirements for your server, was written in my favourite coding language and it lets me publish a whole bilingual website and blog with plain text files (i.e. as edited in Notepad or TextEdit) placed inside folders. Nothing easier.¹ Use a CMS and never go on-line depending on a webmaster for updates.

That’s it. Time for me to get back to what I was practicing and what essentially triggered this post.