Blog

At this point I have the gagnenet.com domain and I’d like to find hosting for https://gagnenet.com/. Let’s outline some of the requirements I have: $0 cost is highly desirable Easy HTTPS certificate management is a plus Publishing new content should be simple There are two hosting providers I’ve tinkered around with in the past that I decided to explore further. The first is GitHub Pages. It’s free and publishing new content is simple. It works by creating a GitHub repository and pushing content up. In the most basic case, you create HTML/CSS/JavaScript content locally and do a git push to publish your website updates. They also have integration with a static site generater called Jekyll. Making use of the integration, you can create content in markdown and push that to the Git repo. After that, GitHub runs Jekyll on their platform to build your website from the markdown. GitHub Pages does let you choose a custom domain, but they do not offer HTTPS built in. To accomplish that, we can introduce Cloudflare as a proxy. This great because Cloudflare has built in support for using Let’s Encrypt so it will handle creating and updating the certificates for you. ...

It’s well known in the computing world that naming things is hard. In this case, I needed a domain name for my web identity. I’ve owned elijahg.com for 14+ years. Soon after my wife and I started a family, I realized that the elijahg.com domain really only worked for me and I wanted something that could be useful for my whole family. So that obviously meant the first domain I looked into purchasing was gagne.com, taken. gagne.net, taken. How about one of those new domains. gagne.tech was available and I could buy it for 10 years on the cheap. The problem is that it seems after 10 years that price might be $50/year to renew. I didn’t want to risk building an identity on something and then being on the hook for $50/year. So that pushed me back to .com and .net top level domains (TLD). Since I couldn’t get exactly what I wanted from either of those TDLs, I figured I might as well stick with .com. ...

Welcome to the first post of my new blog. I have tried to blog a few times in the past, but have always fizzled out. It seems that an important question to ask is, “why blog?” A few reasons that come to mind off the cuff for me are: document things I learn to cement the concepts give myself a place to search and reference my notes share knowledge with others start a dialog with others to learn new things That all seems nice, but how am I going to keep this going? I think a need a goal. Let’s set a goal of making at least one new post every week. The topics I’m currently interested in posting on are: ...