Blog improvements.
New year, new blog, new me
My New Year's resolution™ is to blog more, be a better person, and fulfill all of my dreams.
Okay, none of that is necessarily true, but I hope that I won't leave this blog-thing to rot like so many others. It's really sad to read a good/helpful blog post (you won't find any here) and find that the author stopped posting years ago. I'm sure they all have other things going on—like having a life—but for some reason it makes me a special kind of sad…
A new and improved:
Jekyll theme
When I first created this blog, I used this theme but I was never particularly sold on it. I shopped around for other themes and found this one, which I changed to suit my tastes (and on which I'm fully sold).
Publishing method
For the past several months I've attempted—several times—to permanently incorporate Emacs into my
workflow. The prime mover behind these attempts has been a desire to use org-mode and all of the
niceties that come with it: org-capture, org-agenda, and so forth.
I think I can successfully say that I use Emacs now (which I intend to write about), and one of the neatest things I'm able to do
now is publish blog posts with org2jekyll (you can find the GitHub project here).
Home lab
I moved into a new apartment back in August and it seemed like a great time to graduate to a small server rack. Originally I attempted to MacGyver together a lack rack but it eventually disintegrated.
In addition to cleaning everything up and making it look presentable, it seemed logical to also start over from scratch. Here's what I did:
- Hypervisor: KVM → ESXi
- Networking/Firewall: Open vSwitch → pfSense
- DHCP: ISC DHCP → pfSense
- DNS: BIND → FreeIPA
- Identity Management/LDAP: OpenLDAP → FreeIPA
I'll probably start it over again and do some research and planning this time. Considering that my evaluation period for ESXi has ended, I'll have to make a decision about whether to pay $200 dollars for VMware's EVALExperience or try something else.
The future
Going back and reading my old posts, there's a lot that I'd like to improve upon. It would probably be worth re-documenting my blogging process, mostly because I had to refer to it when installing a different theme and it wasn't as helpful as I'd like. I'd like to document all the moving parts (Jekyll, Apache, and Capistrano) in greater detail as well since I didn't really do that either. Of course there's the documentation for each project which could answer any question better than I ever could, but it's nice to have it all spelled out in detail as it applies to my use case.
Apart from documenting blog things, I also plan on documenting my usage of Emacs. So to enumerate things to expect from this blog:
- Documentation of my use of Jekyll, Apache, and Capistrano to implement a blog.
- Writing about Emacs and maybe learning some Emacs Lisp.
- Documenting whatever I end up doing with my home lab.
That list looks okay, but learning things just for the sake of the thing itself is often times very challenging. My home lab project has been incredibly broad in scope and doesn't really have much of an end game. I know opinions vary on the value of certifications, but it might function well as a source of guidance and have a little more than blog posts to show for it. I'm thinking maybe RHCSA or a VMware certification.