Another year; another static site generator. I’m really enjoying working with Rust so I’ve migrated this blog to Zola. After explaining why I’m switching, I’ll provide a brief walkthough of the steps I had to take.

Why Zola?

I was previously using Hexo for my blog, which is yet another static site generator in JS. It’s quite popular, but I don’t work very often with the NodeJS ecosystem so I found that every time I wanted to write a new blog post, I had to get aquainted with the latest updates to all the various dependencies – many of which had security issues. That was all quite a bit of effort for software that is only ever used in the build process to generate static HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Disclosure: This post was generated using Anthropic Claude+ via Poe using my notes as a prompt. Read Using LLMs to actually finish some blog posts for more details.

Here we go again! As an experienced writer and coder, I was filled with excitement at the prospect of setting up my own little Kubernetes cluster to explore. Though I’ve been building with code and prose for decades, tinkering with new tools never gets old. While setting up this cluster, however, I couldn’t help but muse on the implications of developing and promoting tools that could someday change the means of production as we know it, ushering in a new age of luxury gay space communism where creativity reigns supreme. A guy can dream!

Pleroma is an open source social network platform that is a part of the Fediverse. In this write-up, I will be describing my experience with installing the OTP release on a Linux VM in Google Cloud by following the official documentation.

For someone who works with Kubernetes clusters daily and deploys to them using Helm, the idea of manually configuring a VM to run my application is an adorable flashback to a simpler time. It brings me back to my days as a student systems administrator at Oregon State or the very early days wherein I would run Unreal Tournament servers from my home Linux computer. Are you feeling the nostalgia?