So I’ve finally created my own blog, and you’ve found it, somehow. Congratulations! Expect only posts about technology - networking, data centres, open source software, reports from conferences I attend, et cetera. Essentially, various stuff I play around with both at home and at my workplace Redpill Linpro.

I guess a sensible thing to discuss in the first post is my choice of blogging platform. There were several criteria on my wish list:

  • I want my content to stay mine, and be trivially portable to another platform (including self-hosting) if I so choose. I am therefore rather sceptical to «blog in the cloud» solutions such as Blogger and WordPress.
  • I wanted to get started really quickly without spending any time doing web design, software installations, database setups, and so on. Installing and maintaining my own instance of WordPress or some other CMS - no thanks.
  • I prefer to author posts in a simple (yet sufficiently powerful) markup language that is well suited to technical content (automatic syntax highlighting of quoted code, for example). The markup language should of course be editable with my favourite editor too, so no binary formats!
  • I would very much like to use a simple Git repo as the underlying database where all the content is stored.
  • I want my content to be available over IPv6. I expect to be writing quite a lot about IPv6, so not having the blog available over IPv6 would feel rather embarrassing.

So what I ended up with in the end was GitHub Pages, which automatically renders the files stored in the backend Git repo through Jekyll to create a simple blog. In addition to that, I used Tinypress in order to bootstrap the initial contents of the backend Git repo. Tinypress also provides a web interface where I can create or edit posts, which I think will prove convenient from time to time.

UPDATE 2017-07-31: The information below is no longer accurate; GitHub Pages and Fastly now do support IPv6.

So far so good. The one thing that’s missing, is IPv6 support. The GitHub Pages service, or more precisely its CDN provider Fastly, does not appear to support IPv6 yet:

$ host toreanderson.github.io
toreanderson.github.io is an alias for github.map.fastly.net.
github.map.fastly.net has address 185.31.17.133

Given that it’s 2015, that’s rather disappointing, but I’m guessing I’ll find a way to work around it for now. Most likely I’ll set up some IPv6 frontend system at work that can convert IPv6 traffic to IPv4 and pass it along to the Fastly back-end. The details of this will most likely be the second post. Stay tuned.