satyrs.eu/uses

I’ve put this off for long enough, so here’s a page all about the plumbing and machinery that makes up the tech stack of this site. Be warned: nerd shit ahead!

On-prem: persepolis

This site is hosted on persepolis, a beat-up old Dell laptop running Linux Mint that i keep tucked away in a drawer. It uses Nginx as a reverse proxy to redirect to the server itself, which is a Node and Express.js affair. Pages are mostly written in Pug, a syntactic sugarfest of a language that compiles down into good ol’ HTML. The venerable (and public domain!) Sqlite serves as a database.

Posts on The Garden are authored in a custom CMS (shown above), usually in Rubric, a home-grown alternative to Markdown. The actual writing process mostly takes place on the über-minimalist Dotpad 9000, created out of frustration with having to look at all the bells and whistles of normal text-editor apps. Interaction between the server and the author is mediated by HTMX, because i’m too grug-brained to understand React.

Off-prem: the internet

The domain satyrs.eu is registered with Gandi, a French domain-name agent. I think they got bought out a while ago, so i don’t know if i’d still recommend them today, but i’m too lazy to switch. Emails are handled by the German Tuta, which prides itself on encrypting everything (and thereby making it bloody impossible to use an external client), and the lock in your browser is secured by the San Francisco–based Let’s Encrypt.

On-prem: vindolanda

But enough about that. The real action happens at my desktop, vindolanda. I don’t remember exactly what i put in it when i built it, but it’s got an Nvidia graphics card, a lovely RGB-free wooden North case by Fractal Design, and runs (again) Linux Mint on the inside. Hooked up to it are two monitors — portrait on the left, landscape on the right — a Logitech mouse, and a cheapo pink-and-white Sunsonny mechanical keyboard, because once you clack, you never go back.

Programming is done in VS Code (setup shown above), with the warm hues of the Gruvbox Material theme and sensible serifs of Drafting* Mono. Graphics for the site are made in Gimp, the standard on Linux, but i miss my old go-to Paint.net more with each passing day. Inkscape gets a look-in for vector assets, too, though they’re comparatively rarer.