About time for a (site) change

Now that Tumblr is showing signs of being on it's way to death I am wary of leaving my content on there. This angst is not reduced by the behaviour of other companies like Flickr, deciding maybe it wouldn't be keeping all those photos for you after all.

The world has also moved on since I last seriously touched this setup years ago, with HTTPS now expected and lots more choices. So, I decided to bring it all back under my control again as a static site.

I'd been eyeing Gatsby for the past year as something I wanted to learn. I finally got round to going through the tutorials over xmas and liked the simplicity.

The first pass port of Tumblr content went well. I then ported over the remainder of the content that was reachable via the old front-page. More details available under "about this site".

The final thing to do was add https support for things I link to as embedded images, like LSystems and Sham Tartans.

I wanted to improve my understanding of how Kubernetes fits together, whilst not spending too much, so took advantage of the new Kubernetes support on Digital Ocean. I've opted for a single cluster which provides ingress and https to services embedded in it e.g. LSystems.

Rather than beefing up the cluster with lots of monitoring and observability from the start I am instead working from the outside-in by starting with a cheap external monitor, updown.io, and will add more detailed monitoring as and when I need it. This is sufficient for hobby projects like this where I am trying to minimise costs whilst learning incrementally, as opposed to going for 100% availability. This is WIP, but so far, after a week or so, I am finding it good.