Insane Rambles About Technology

Itanium Emulator Documentation

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The website is back up, again

We are now in year three of this “contribution”* to “the sum of human knowledge”**.

* For some definition of contribution.

** For some definition of knowledge.

The site went offline for a few days on August 18 because I forgot to pay to renew my hosting. Just like the first post on the site.

This site uses WordPress, hosted by Porkbun. Porkbun is an excellent, no-nonsense domain registrar. Their hosting, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. Images are pretty slow to render, you can forget about serving videos, and the interface screeches to a halt when writing very lengthy, complex articles. (Although that last one might just be WordPress.)

Combine that with the $120/year hosting price and the ongoing sabotage of WordPress by its founder I was planning on jumping ship to Ghost when this cycle was up. Sadly, just as I was set to sign up for an account, they jacked up the hosting prices by 66%, transitioning from a reasonable price where I’d save a few bucks a year to an instant no-brainer in the negative sense. It just doesn’t make sense.

Sure, I could self-host WordPress, or Ghost for that matter. But when I started this blog, I took the words of Soatok very seriously, to tremendous success:

I don’t want to write my website, I want to write stuff for my website.

– Soatok, paraphrased

In other words, I could spend endless hours carefully sketching out a fully custom, self-hosted, from-scratch CMS with wonderful features and easter eggs* and little cartoon characters talking, but then, when all was said and done, I’d probably not have any energy to actually write 7,000 word rambles about running Dolphin Emulator on a 3DS.

* If you like Websites, give this one a visit. I spent over two hours just pouring over every little tiny corner of this place.

Thinking about the underlying system as little as possible has worked for me– it frees up energy to actually write the things I want to say. Letting someone else manage my hosting has been a success, for now. Maybe next year I’ll find a better WordPress host for cheaper, or move to self-hosting, but for another year I’m happy to cough up $120 again to make this Someone Elses Problem.

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Comments

4 responses to “The website is back up, again”

  1. Jacob Alexander Tice Avatar
    Jacob Alexander Tice

    Why aren’t comments working

    Reply
    1. nocoffei Avatar
      nocoffei

      I get a lot of spam. I do manually review every single comment posted to the site. I just don’t do it very often. as evidenced by the three month lead time between your comment and my approval. it’s been a while since I wrote an article. thank you for your input!

      Reply
  2. Yevgeny Avatar
    Yevgeny

    Love your posts! I have a few technical suggestions. I’d strongly recommend changing the default admin login slug from /wp-admin to something that’s harder to guess. This is an example of security through obscurity, which isn’t typically a good practice, but it’s surprisingly effective in this case. You’re using WordPress, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but since it powers nearly half of the internet, it’s very attractive to attackers. If you check your logs, you’ll see a couple hundred (maybe even thousands) of requests for /wp-admin.php. These bots are probing *lots* of IPs trying to find WP login pages, and then either the same bots or different ones try to brute force them. You’re good with a strong password and 2FA, but these brute force attempts burn a lot of resources.

    In your comment above, you mentioned getting a shitload of spam, which is normal if you aren’t JS or interactive challenging submissions. If you’re don’t want that, you can get a free Akismet license. It’s pretty effective against spam and I believe the Akismet WP plugin is preinstalled so it needs minimal setup.

    I don’t check this email very often, but I’ll keep an eye on my inbox. I’m happy to help with security and self hosting related stuff.

    Reply
    1. nocoffei Avatar
      nocoffei

      I genuinely can’t tell if this is spam or not itself, but I’m leaning towards no. My hosting provider actually forbids the use of wp-admin. It also came with Akismet pre installed, I simply haven’t bothered to make use of it yet.

      Reply

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