August 28, 2022

NMS Now at Home

This morning, I installed the Norman Mailer Society web landing page on my home server. I was hosting it on a subdomain of this web site, but since my SSL certificate was expiring, and Namecheap wanted $35 for a new one, I decided to make a change. So, as of this writing, normanmailersociety.org is now running on my home Apache server behind a reverse proxy and the domain name (and DNS) is now hosted through Cloudflare. This is a cost-free solution for now, as the SSL is via Let’s Encrypt. I figure that even if there is some downtime, since my house does seem to lose power quite a bit, Cloudflare caches might even provide a backup in down times. It’s a simple, one-page template anyway that just points to additional pages on Project Mailer which Namecheap still hosts and likely will for the foreseeable future.

That said, LitWiki is now on my home web server, and it's been doing well. It’s much more complex, run on Mediawiki, but it’s handled everything my students have thrown at it so far. In fact, it’s pretty spritely. It makes me think: maybe this web site needs to come home. It’ll save me about $50 a year and provide much more flexibility. Something to ponder.

Now, what can I do with grlucas.com? I’m still thinking about a minimalist portfolio site. I need to be careful, though. One of the reasons I installed Mediawiki here was to consolidate all of my various and sundry web properties under one, easy-to-manage domain. Still, it’s hard to resist using the resources at my disposal.