I had plans, big plans, but realistically I only have so much time to focus on all the things I want to do and the underpinnings of Sausage Engineering was never at the top of my priorities.

Up until now, the tech stack for this website has been nginx for static assets (but not reverse proxy or anything like that), node+expressjs for the backend, and MongoDB to store posts. Whenever I need to update or add a post, I fire up a Mongo Express container on the host box and cram my post info into a one-line Markdown field 🤮.

I had started re-writing the backend portion as an ASP.net web app with an actual UX for editing posts and OAuth through Google for authentication, but I put that project down and never got back to it. And so, every update to the site has been the awkward firing up of Mongo Express and Markdown cramming, which means I don’t post a lot.

Considering I’m the only one who posts here and the content doesn’t change much, and I’ve really enjoyed watching the old site get hit by bots trying to find exploits, I decided to start looking at static site generators.

Now, here we are. I landed on using Jekyll as the site generator, mostly because of the simplicity and relation to GitHub. So far, so good, and I’ve been able to retire the backend and MongoDB services on my host box. I’m sure I’ll find some bugs here and there and I’ll work to get them fixed ASAP. And, hopefully, I can start updating more on the projects I’ve been working on lately.